


Love In The Age of Vampires

by NorthChill



Series: These Savage Seasons [2]
Category: Lost Boys (Movies), The Lost Boys: The Thirst, The Lost Boys: The Tribe
Genre: Also puppies, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Biting, Bloodlust, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Gore, Half Vampire Star, M/M, Manipulation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Control, San Cazador, Sequel, Ten Years Later, Undead Shopping Trips, Vampire Alan, Vampire Edgar, Vampire Michael, Vampire Sam, Vampires, Werewolves, dodgy humor, everyone is screwed up, except Zoe, more tags to come, one sided Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2018-10-20 15:37:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10665669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthChill/pseuds/NorthChill
Summary: How many more years will they stay here, in San Cazador? It’s the hunting ground for their coven, but every town they entered Alan deemed his property. Give Alan a map and he’d navigate his geographical bloodlust.Star is resigned to this brave new world, but nothing is as it seems. San Cazador brings its own savage season, and change prickles the air like the damp of an incoming storm.Sequel to Womb For The Lonely.





	1. Nanook

**Author's Note:**

> All taboo themes in this work are not condoned in real life. If you find these themes disturbing, please avoid. I do not own the Lost Boys. This is set ten years after Womb For The Lonely.
> 
> Star explores San Cazador, and finds a friend. Sam gets a dog.

_Round and round like a horse on a carousel, we go,_  
_Will I catch up to love? I could never tell, I know,_  
_Chasing after you is like a fairytale, but I,_  
_Feel like I'm glued on tight to this carousel_

 _This horse is too slow,_  
_We're always this close,_  
_Almost, almost, we're a **freakshow**_

 _**-** _ **Melanie Martinez, Carousal**

 

Star never intends to fall in love, not again.

But there is this girl in San Cazador, the one in the book shop brimmed with glossy albums and comic books and a flat television showing Marvel Movies.

Zoe doesn’t dress her age. A black waistcoat with mismatch buttons, dark hair tickled pink one side, a tutu that puffs out purple like a sunset explosion against her legs. Star glides in, too quiet, and shifts _The Dark Knight Returns_ from the closest shelf, but her eyelashes quiver over the top of it, her focus on the woman bent over the counter, fishing out a squeeze ball Superman for a smiling child.

A man should be her first kill. Maybe a man who looks like David, or even Michael, to blow off some frustration, or make it easier. But this woman, barely in her mid 20s, with her plum coloured fingernails and non-pierced ears and breezy smile, is what she can taste in the air. She doesn’t smell right, but she’s not a vampire, for Star can also smell the sunshine, jam and pancakes, worn thrift stores, musky candlewax and all too human sweat. But there is something else. Not the ocean, oh god no, vampires smell of the ocean. If anything, it’s the brunt of undergrowth on Star’s delicate nostrils, woodland and rotting orange leaves, dewdrops on midnight grass. Star thinks of the Dutch settlements sat along the Hudson River, sleepy glens haunted by twilight tales of ghouls and witches and omens, lurking in the hide of crops and rolling fields.

Star likes to get close on these long nights, where she has nothing to do but wander until Edgar feeds her from the wrist like a child and kisses her on her thighs and feet until the sun rises and they sleep. She teases the idea of the first kill like a tassel on her shawl. Could she do it? Like, really do it? Observe when the shop was closed, when Zoe locks up for the night, quirky cat bag slung carelessly over her shoulder. Zoe walks like she fears nothing. Would Star step from the shadows, give her something to fear?

But Zoe returns her smile and Star’s original dilemma returns in full force.

She can’t.

Alan calls her weak. Not secretly, but matter of fact, in front of Sam and Edgar and her, when she pulls to the side in the run down theatre that makes up their current sleeping arrangements. Edgar says nothing but lifts his chin with a rumble in the back of his throat, but Alan never goes too far.

Thank God for Sam, who tells Alan again to lay off Twinkle; she’s a part of their family now, isn’t she? And halfies have their uses! Star and Sam go shopping together in ethereal reruns of their time together as teenagers. Star retains her vampire prettiness and flirts with the shop assistants, coaxing their words to roundabout invitations, so Sam can enter the wide spaced designer shops with wooden hangers and buffed vinyl floors and admire his reflection in the mirror. Sam, the eternal heart throb, baby faced and blue eyed, gold spiked pixie cut and a never ending trail of sweet faced boys who end up with their skin in his teeth.

Sam haunts second hand stores for Star and hand picks moon earrings and lace skirts with tiered bottoms.  He styles her with more detail and study she ever merited for herself.  What she wore in the cave was picked at random from the Santa Carla marketplaces after musical festivals and hippie gigs. But Sam picks out brown camisoles, shabby chic floral skirts, a buckskin Gillet with faux fur around the arms. Autumn beads on her ears and wrists, all the colours of sweet rot.

Star can’t hate Sam. They share a hobby, and a man. And Sam loves Edgar, in a guileless way, in a madcap no questions asked kind of way, the sort of love Edgar never knew he needed until it happened.

Star’s pale fire of feelings is no match for Sam’s cursed and sunny adoration.

Neither of them are a match for Alan.

.

.

Her infatuation isn’t bloodlust.

Star laughs, just out of nowhere, flicking through the pages of _A Serious House On Serious Earth,_ for there is too much blood and violence in the pages and a man just ate his child and wife, and isn’t that what Edgar did to her?

“Are you alright?” Zoe tucks a stray hair behind her pointed ear. The necklace she wears against her white collarbone is butterflies and plastic red hearts, all linked on a gunmetal chain. Cutesy and hard. Apple green fingernails cut too short remove the book from her shaking hands. Zoe’s wrists are bare too, and she angles them so the warm lull of the light catches the creases between the veins. “This book is too freaky. I couldn’t finish it.”

“I don’t mind freaky things,” Star says, with the smooth quake of the half vampire. Tracking, but never strong enough to hunt. “But that’s a bit gory for me.”

“Then surely I could find you something you could like!” Zoe chirps, cheerful. “Here, at the Bookener, we have everything you could want!” She frowns, pouting slightly. “Except graphic novels.”

“What’s a graphic novel?”

Zoe beams at Star as if she is her very namesake.

.

.

The night is cooling off. The ramshackle theatre waits on the coast of San Cazador, off an abandoned road. Mist dregs around her ankles, razor wire and warning signs a pained reminder of where she has been, and where she has found herself yet again. Maybe there is a bullshit supernatural link between coastal towns and vampires.

 _The Bookener_ plastic bag bumps against her leg. The itch of tiredness settles on her skin, making her cold, and she yanks on Edgar’s old marine jacket over her camisole. Naked arms, naked neck, an all too willing victim’s wardrobe. Edgar, even in the symbolic starch of his camouflage coat, protects her from the elements, and by the still lingering scent of the trailer, from herself.

And it seems from the attention of the men over the road.

They’re like her, but pityingly young. Good looking frat boys with nasty smiles. The lean over a parked sports car, and Star knows it had better not be Alan’s or the elder Frog would be wearing their faces for breakfast. They holler at her, battering the air with innuendo, but the bloat of sound is a squander in her ears. She grants the fledglings one wandering look before she enters the theatre.

The lower rooms buzz with activity and Star inwardly groans. Alan has company.

The slurring vowels tells her instantly its Shane Powers, with his ragged sea scuffed locks framing his handsome face, shark teeth and jade dangling from his bare chest.  

“I’ve told you,” Edgar has as much time for this bozo dead as if he’d been alive. Outcast Edgar, who cut down monsters twice as beautiful and charismatic then he’d ever been. As a vampire, he has his own kind of quasi awkward charm. Before, it was just for her. Now it is for the hunt. Also for Sam and Alan, but she shouldn’t be jealous of that fact. “We’re not interested in sharing our turf.”

“Come on,” Shane likes to think his pacifying speech acts as an attractive mediator. Sam had said it made him sound like a prick. “We could join forces. Work it round, find a compromise.”

“Why would we compromise?” Alan is leant against the pillar next to Edgar. There’s blood on his tank top, seams ripped where someone struggled. “Go back to Luna Bay. You won’t find your sire here.”

Shane tucks his tongue back inside his pretty mouth. Sam smirks behind his copy of _Rolling Stones._

“You don’t want to make an enemy of me, Frog,” he warns. His face warps and Star starts, trying to push the sound back in her throat, but Edgar has already seen her. He jerks his head at Sam, who drops his magazine with a wolfish grin and paces in front of her.

But Star _looks_ at Shane. His face is all wrong. The teeth are sharkish, the nose pinched and high, the eyes too close together, the skin nobbled and veined. The true faces of the Lost Boys was smooth and baby like, brows arched around red rimmed eyes. Horrible, yes, but perfect.

Alan’s smile is like a shadow moving across a sky.

“That’s not cute, bud.” Sam fiddles with his diamanté earring. “Sign of bad breeding.”

Star knows nothing about turning, whether there is a good or bad way to do it, but all she knows is that Shane looks wrong, bat like and ugly, as if the blood he digested was counterfeit. A botched turning, not meant to happen, mutated and sick. Star feels a stab of pity.

Shane glances at her. His face melts back, as if in surprise.

“You…” He gestures to her. The corner of Edgar’s cheek twitches. “I know you. What’s your name?”

Star gazes back, silent. Star thinks back to the feeding on the Surf Nazis, where she had trailed the blood and viscera clinging to the sand, desperately searching for Michael’s scent. They’d been a body in the water, but she’d glided so fast, bare feet hitting tarmac and stones, struggling to stay aloft, dizzy and hungry and devastated, that she’d left it. Haflies that fed on the dying became vampires quicker.

“You were part of the rival gang.” She keeps _The Bookener_ bag close. Sam has spied the comics logo printed on the plastic, and he keeps rubbing his hands together, trying to break the conversation with a pleading mewl under his breath. “The Surf Nazis, right?”

The name rings for the Frog Brothers, who exchange a brooding look. Torn comic books, stolen goods, bloody noses.

“Yeah.” Shane brightens. He eases the space between them, touching her hair, the curve of her cheek, bumping his finger against her earrings, as if he could pull her back into his memory. “You’re older then I remember, but still beautiful. I can see why David had you on his bike.”

“I was bait.” Clipped, she pulls back from his touch, but the hand still follows, and Edgar snarls. “I was a token, nothing more.”

Not necessarily true. She was part pet, part little sister. But David never gave her the time of day besides a mocking turn of his brow and an encouragement to kill. She hated the assumption they were lovers. It made her ill. David never looked at her, but at Michael, only ever at Michael.

The old wounds prise open, barely a centimeter, but it’s just enough, and she hisses, knocks his hand away with a wayward claw.

“You’re still a half,” he whispers, as if awed.

Yes. Still a half, always a half.

Poor little falling Star, stopped short between the expanse of the limitless sky and collide of the rock earth.

Always a half vampire, and Edgar will do everything in his power to keep it that way.

.

.

All that is gold does not glitter, a wise person had said, and Star had seen the saying in cheap cafes, words jointed in sequins and crystals on white plac wood. Maybe Zoe has that on her wall somewhere.

The mornings in Santa Carla were made of gold, but here the rising sun streaks through the half closed blinds in all shades of peach, weaving stretchmarks on the wallpaper. Star rubs her empty belly. The _Harley Quinn_ comic chosen for her by Zoe is neglected at the end of the bed. This dressing room is the only room that faces the sun, and so naturally, she had claimed it.

Sam had gone to bed early, gobbling up the latest comics in a frenzied feed of reading. Alan had sighed and scoffed and rolled his eyes, but was none too fast to pick up the comics Sam had left behind, following to also retreat to the bowels of the theatre.

Edgar stands in the dust and shade of the doorway, jacket slung over his back. His arms are bare, muscled. He looks more human, more grit of the earth then Sam and Alan, salt still in his skin and sweat between the creases of his stomach. Only when he transforms – a feat she has never seen and something he had always hidden from her – must he look like the others, all winter skin and blood moon eyes.

“Star,” He murmurs, gentle, and she despises how she trembles at it. “You need to feed.”

Maybe there is a sexual thrill to the whole feed the half vampire before each morning. Maybe he keeps her halfway to grant a secret chance she may one day escape all this, that some other hard lipped adolescent with negligent parents will find them and drive stakes through their hearts and set her free. Or maybe he likes her like this, a little warm body of humanity he can keep close during their sunlit sleeps, a reminder of what has come before and what he can still enjoy, the pride that she kept his past lessons to heart and he can keep that, keep her, in this exquisite half state, that she depends on him so fully to keep her humanity intact, that he can still be a hero and keep a potential monster at bay, even if it is her.

She’s still a trinket, a plaything, a weak tie to humanity that a self-indulgent monster can feel good about. A part of the old him alive, maybe, he likes to philosophise. He wears Star like a cross on a chain and she lets him.

“I’m not hungry,” she replies, even as her stomach growls and the room swims. She’s gotten used to feeding time, and so has the bloodlust. “Go to your brother, Edgar.”

But Edgar does not go. Instead, he shuts the blinds, his hands smoking momentarily in the sickly pink light. The blinds snap and there is a blackness, and Star cries out, for he is already at the end of the bed, his palms already healed from the burn, and he glows, lightly, and smiles, lovingly.

“Edgar…”

“You need to feed, Star,” He commands, firm. “Alan will get suspicious if you hold back.”

“Why?”

“He knows what happened with David.”

The accusation is soft, but without fear. Edgar is so confident she would never betray them, never scurry off into the crowd looking for a friend with human skin and human eyes. With him, it’s different. By allowing her to live as a half vampire, he has done what David didn’t. He’s compromised as best as he could.

Wonderful.

“You took care of David,” she jokes, weakly, even as he crawls towards her, settling his body over hers, her hips to the weight of his lower waist. Edgar had been underweight in the trailer, never eating enough, everything tinned and packaged and microwaved, mostly eaten cold or half cooked. Star had tried her best. Bacon sandwiches and simple pasta, meatballs and macaroni cheese, hot meat meals with potatoes and tinned sweetcorn, eggs for breakfast at four in the morning. She kept him fed, she kept him warm.

The blood had made his body bulkier, his already impressive reflexes lightning fast. Sam could see through you in the blink of an eye and read and manipulate thoughts and emotions like changing water. Alan could tear and torture minds, intimidate vampires five times his age and twist their heads off like bottle tops. Edgar could fight, rip his way through hordes of humans and night crawlers alike, silence entire rooms with a glare alone.

They were young vampires, and very, very dangerous.

But Edgar, wearing his fourteen year old smile (it always makes her ache with guilt) bites into his wrist and holds it, toying, just above her lips.

The smell of it is crashes her like a roller coaster and she is on him, fine fingers clamped around his wrist to keep it steady, sucking greedily, lapping the edges of his torn skin with her tongue. It takes her a moment to realise Edgar’s fingers are in her hair, stroking against the scalp, before the wrist is pulled away and she blinks, confused, blood cool on her chin.

“I’ve not…”

Edgar tugs off his vest and leans back. Star follows on her hands and knees, still looking for the wrist that has by now healed, and with a shudder of shame, she watches as Edgar slits a line down his chest to his navel, and Star jumps at it, kissing the blood, using her budding fangs to keep the wound open. She can taste Edgar’s kill. A man in his mid-30s, physically strong, clean living. Edgar never went for soft targets. Maybe it was because he had to feed two, but more likely it was because Edgar craved strength. Jocks, thick backed surfers, sportsman, bodybuilders. He never wanted to feel powerless again in his life.

Her half beating heart lurches.

Edgar would never go for a high cheeked comic shop assistant.

The thought of it calms her. She pushes back, her top wet with red. They have a child together, she thinks breathlessly. There is a small body out there, maybe nine or ten, wearing her and Edgar’s shared cells like a honing beckon for their past life. And all she can think about is stiff black pigtails and geek net skirts, and a woman who should wear earrings but doesn’t, and why does that irritate her so much?

“That…” She laughs; distracts herself. “You’re a tease.”

“Yeah,” He answers gruffly; impatient. The skirt is bunched up around her hips by his grip and as he goes down on her, her feet dip into the square of his back. He’s gotten better at this, she thinks, but maybe that’s because he has power here, over her.  Gone is the awkward fumbling, the giggles she would hide beneath her arm as he would spit and swear and try again, but it would still feel so damn good, if only for the punch of affection in her chest.

She arches her back, and says nothing, only to whine air between the spaces of her lips, and to gasp as his teeth sink into her upper thigh. It’s his turn to feed from her now. There is still vulnerable human tang in her blood, a small and determined heartbeat, and he gorges.

Each touch of his skin against hers since his teeth found her throat have been a miniature violation. The rotten little thought shimmers like the crackle of soda pop on the front of her brain, but Edgar looks up at her, between her legs, blood on his face and an awful innocence in his eyes.

She kisses him with his and her blood. Star’s hands slink over the rise of his back as he enters her, and she throws her hair back, revealing her neck as yet another invitation. He’ll drain her down soon, to nought but her bones, and it’s hateful how she craves it even as it frightens her.

As usual she withstands his ferocity, and Star cannot remain stoic under his attentions, no matter how she tries, and he snickers as she cries and shivers and finishes, before he follows after. Star rolls on her side, Edgar moulded into her back, his arm possessive on her waist, and Star feels herself drift into sleep in the sweet and heavy air.

.

.

“We should get a hellhound.” Sam, flat on his stomach, taps the picture of Ace, Batman’s dog. He sticks out his bottom lip with an _hmph_ and rolls on his back, holding the comic above him like a schoolgirl. “There’s a breeder in town. We should look into it.”

Alan scoffs and removes a blunt spur from his boot. He sharpens it with steel, holding it aloft so he can spy the glint and spark of his work.

“We’re not getting a dog,” He mutters. “It’ll shit everywhere and you won’t look after it.”

“Hey, hey,” Sam swings his legs around, leather soles a squeak on the floor. Alan hopes if he does get a dog, it’ll chew its way through his stupid shoe collection. “I had a dog once. And it’ll be cool. Complete our image.”

Alan can’t be sure what “image” Sam is referring to. The mallrat’s corner of the room is the worst kind of man chic, catwalk garish, posters plastered everywhere and an oak wardrobe Star had found in the upper floors that now housed Sam’s ongoing collection of clothes. Not to mention the tiny bathroom out back he’d claimed for himself, stuffed full of hair products and creams and cologne. Sam smells too much like a human. It’s quite disgusting, actually.

“No.”

Sam throws his hands up, querulous.

“Guess I’ll have to ask Edgar then.”

“Edgar will agree with me.”

“Really? Doesn’t agree with you quite as much as he used to.”

“Enough.” Once upon a time, Alan wouldn’t have given in, but Sam is no longer a yes man fledgling, as much as Edgar is no longer a remorseful ex-hunter. It is only natural that when everything has come full circle to allow a little leniency, here or there. He curls his lip. “Fine. Take Star if you want to go. I think Edgar’s sluts could do with a little night on the town.”

“That’s mean.” Sam laughs regardless. In recent years, it’s been harder to offend Sam. He looks at Edgar and his eyes sparkle. “Edgar wouldn’t have gotten this laid if he’d stayed a mortal, trust me.”

“How do you know that, mallrat?” Edgar drifts in his vest and camouflage trousers. He smells of Star. Alan wrinkles his nose. Ugh. Cooties.

“Well, let’s just say I know it better now,” Sam winks. He loops an arm around Edgar’s shoulder, pressing in close. As if he needs an excuse.  “Can I have a hell hound?”

Alan and Edgar exchange a weary look.

“No,” Edgar deadpans, settling at the end of Alan’s bed, brushing aside an Automobile magazine. Sam follows, settling in beside him. “It’ll make a mess and you won’t clean up after it.”

Alan leers.

“Shame ‘bout that,” grins Sam. “Alan already said yes.”

“You did?” Edgar squints at his brother, to make sure he is actually who he says he is. “You want one of those things?”

“I told Sam he could get one tonight with Star,” Alan replies slickly. It’s odd being the good guy here. He isn’t sure he likes it, but the disbelieving glare of Edgar is a picture enough to make it worth it. “It’ll keep him entertained for a couple of months, at least.”

“Keep me busy, Alan.” Sam nuzzles Edgar’s neck, parting the hair with his nails. Edgar closes his eyes, keening slight into the touch. Sam’s attentions seem to squeeze each iota of tension out of Edgar’s muscles. Sam comforts him down onto the bed, near the fold of Alan’s lap, and even as his hands are tender, feeling out each curve in Edgar’s face, it’s done with Sam’s customary hunger. Alan strikes his cigarette, props himself against the headboard and idly tangles his hand in Edgar’s hair.

Sam hungers for so many things; fashion, beauty, longevity in love. Sam had been so bitter as a half, so sunnily vindictive as a newly turned. But now, he’s giddy, bouncing from place to place, in love with life as much as he was when he was alive, shining like an opal in the night between them. Terrible, needy Sammy, the emotional carnivore. A wicked and ingenious creation of his, he has to say, but here Alan was, believing _his_ obsession with Edgar would be the death of him.

Sam dozily knocks his thoughts.

“That’s all very flattering, bud,” He waves his hand, and Alan, with a fission of irritation, feels the pressure of Sam’s scrutiny tingle his temples. “Give yourself all the credit, I’ll let ya. But let’s say lights out, ok? Nearly nine in the morning, and I need my beauty sleep.”

Edgar is already asleep, curled into Sam and the hand in his hair.

Alan exhales, and snuffing out his cigarette, pushes himself down, filling out the third and final place in the bed.

.

.

At 3’oclock in the afternoon, San Cazador bustles. The streets are tight with people eager to taste the sun. And oh god, the _sun_. It fumes heat on Star’s back, boils through her skin, as if trying to snuff the dark out. Being out in the sun as a half vampire is akin to an errant mother scrubbing her filthy child with a nail brush.

You can’t get blood out of pores, Star thinks, miserable.

But she’s here now, she made it. It only took the burning of her limbs and the drag of her feet with light like chilli powder on her skin, but she got up. She dressed. Sam’s borrowed sunglasses, wide lenses with leopard print, hide her sensitive eyes.

The dull painful fire in her body is a reminder of the dull painful fire that once inhabited her lungs. Self-consciously she ghosts her chest bone, her neck. The breath she breathes now is so light she can barely feel it.

Of course she’s going to the Bookener.

It looks like the end of a book signing. The big windows that square out toward the centre of the main drag is packed with people, mostly youngsters in scene clothing. Emo Goth sheep, Edgar likes to call them. He obviously hasn’t looked at Alan lately.

Security personal push back any latecomers. Star discreetly eyes the dusty shade of the inside of the book shop.

One of the security man bristles as she approaches. Star lowers her glasses and smiles sweetly.

His returning grin is suitably dopey as she glides out of the sun and into the store.

At the centre of the commotion is a woman Star is sure Sam would know. Tawny hair loose to her shoulders, skin fawned by tanning beds, a face that wouldn’t look out of place on a magazine cover. A line of glossy black hardbacks adorn the table in front of her. Star scans the covers mournfully. Ah, yeah. Sam had a few of these lying around, if only to just wind Alan up. The _Eternity Kiss_ series.

But that isn’t all. Greed sticks to this woman’s blood like burrs. Star can smell it, roll it around on her tongue. Thin, cosmetic, covetous blood.

Gwen Lieber looks her up and down with a flutter of lashes.  Star ignores her and searches the store for Zoe.

“Are you here for the book signing?” Gwen amiably purrs. Star tucks her thumbs into the top of her white crotchet skirt and leans against the bookcase. Too many people have been here, and she struggles to unpick Zoe from the texture of scents bunched in the air. Gwen continues, in a lisp others might find attractive. “You’re late, but I don’t mind a straggler.”

“No thanks.” Star shakes her head. “I’m here to get served.”

Gwen visibly cools.

“I’m afraid all service is postponed.” She sniffs, trailing a loose hair behind her ear. Star still isn’t looking at her, but the door of the stock room. “Because _I’m_ here.”

Zoe flurries in, pink in the cheeks. Perspiration peppers her brow and Star smells her pumpkin blood.

 “I tried to tell her you’re closed for basic business,” Gwen searches Zoe’s hands. “And where is my coffee?”

“The book signing is over, Mrs Lieber,” Zoe’s weary politeness holds back a bite. “It’s time for you to go.”

“The book signing finishes at 3:30.” Gwen sits back, comfortable. “It’s only 3:20.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Star steps between them. Her thirst floods the room. She does not know how to reel it in, if she can at all, but it is as if the hunger pushes through her skin and fights to occupy each breath Zoe takes. Even in the daylight, it’s powerful. “I really enjoyed the comics you chose for me. Can you help me find more?”

Poison Ivy’s predation was too close to home, but Harley Quinn made her laugh (and hurt, if only a little.)

Zoe relaxes.

“Sure!” She brushes past the table, past an indignant Gwen, and they head to the coolest part of the shop. “How did you find Harley Quinn? Too much of a tragic romance?”

.

.

The boozy afternoon becomes a copper sunset. Star sits with Zoe in the window of the Bookener, the long light making them as shadow puppets on the floor. Star has let Zoe chat, felt the warm wash of her words soothe the throb in her gut. Zoe is a simple, but zany name. Easy to say, easy to see. Star tucks her boots inside the lace weave of her skirt. Zoe, Zoe. She likes Zoe.

“I’ve been gabbling,” Zoe shrugs, pulling at her pigtail. “And I haven’t asked your name.”

 “Star.” It always comes out in a slur. She always tries to blow it off, as if it’s as casual as Anne or Christine or Catherine.

“Star?” Zoe’s lips hover on a smile. “That’s pretty.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Star contests gently. “But it was chosen for me, and now, I suppose it’s what I am.”

“You look like a Star.”

“You look like a Zoe.” Star giggles, a whole-hearted bubble of sound, and Zoe joins her, and it’s awkward and a little silly, and Star finds that her thirst is as far away from her now as the moon from the earth, and maybe it’s the sunlight and the brass chain link of Zoe’s bracelet glimmering in the vanishing light, but she feels human.

Uh oh.

She tries to work her vocal chords, to fix the moment and make herself leave, but Zoe bounces to her feet, clapping her hands together. Star’s gaze is drawn to the wired muscles in her legs, as if Zoe has a habit of running long distances.

“Do you like pancakes? I know this real nice place two blocks from here. It’s got a 1950s vibe.”

“Yeah.” Star can imagine the strawberry sauce, heavy with corn syrup, slushing onto flesh coloured batter. Her stomach growls and she nods. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

.

.

“Twinkle, twinkle little star,” An agitated Sam vibrates outside on the street. “How I wonder where you are?”

Alan shares a cigarette with Edgar. The night is considerably young, the sky pale, but Sam was adamant they had an early start. Sammy kept and broke promises as much as he changed his ugly shirts, but god forbid you didn’t keep one owed to him.

Star, the promised companion for Sam’s mutt hunt, had vanished midway through the afternoon. A bold move for the timid half. And an insensitive one, if the mild jitter in Edgar’s blood is anything to go by. Alan puts an arm around his brother, leans his face against the soft lock of Edgar’s hairline. They match their breathing, as they did as kids, even if now their shared heartbeats exists only in the membrane of memory. Slowly, the fever in Edgar stills, and his fingers twist into the back of Alan’s leather coat.

Star approaches, skirt warped around her legs by the wind, one hand holding back her curls. Sam leaps up, hiding his spoilt little furies with an over aggressive welcome.

“There she is!” He sweeps her up by her legs. Star laughs, half nervous, and puts her hands on Sam’s shoulders. Edgar smiles. Alan rolls his eyes. “Twinkle, you’re late!”

“I wasn’t aware I had to be back for anything,” She says softly, sliding down from Sam. “What’s going on?”

“Sam wants a hell hound.” Alan’s barren voice breaks the banter. “You’re to accompany him.”

Credit to Star, although she is taken back, she looks intrigued. Good. She can match Sam’s stupidity page by page then.

“Of course, Alan.” She defers, head down and Alan nods. Good. She’s co-operative. Edgar grants her an approving half smile.

“We’ll be off, then,” Sam takes Star’s hand, pulling her into the wind. “You two playboys don’t have too much fun without me, hm?”

“We’ll try not to, Sam,” Edgar affectionately ducks at Sam’s perfect hair. His hands trace from Sam’s shoulder to the side of Star’s arm and back again.

Alan whistles with two fingers. Edgar matches his brother’s ravening grin and takes to the air.

.

.

Sam is in a good mood.

He prowls through the crowds, trench coat billowing behind him, Star trotting to keep up. San Cazador is loud, music pumping through speakers, the delicious hum of humanity parching her tongue.

Sam struts, drawing glances from all directions. He hasn’t fed, not yet, and the pull of his thirst acts as an aphrodisiac in the crowds.

“Where are we going, Sam?” Star is perplexed by the fact they are on the main drag. She imagined a warehouse, a back street porn shop, whatever front the so called breeder would have for his dogs. But they have stopped outside a very normal, clean looking pound.

“Here it is, Sparkle,” Sam pulls her close in a brotherly one armed hug. “Nice place. No kill centre as well. I donated a pretty penny here.”

“You donate to dog shelters?”

He flashes her a cheeky grin.

“We’re not all monsters, Twinkle.”

“Oh, right.” She follows him down the path. “I remember that next time you dislocate someone’s spine. He likes dogs, its fine.”

“It should be! Dogs are innocent, Twinkle. They live purely by the whims and wants of their masters.”

 _Love has made you a dog,_ Star thinks fleetingly. _And also one out of me._

“Sam Emerson.” A man is waiting for them by the open door. Elderly, with a veterinary coat and furred white hair. The slither of his greeting halts any façade of normality. “And you have a guest with you. Star, I presume?”

To hear her name emerge from the thin, red mouth makes her shudder. 

Sam smiles. It is without caution.

“Yes, Dr Wilfbane. We’re here, as promised.”

Dr Wilfbane floats his hands out. The gap between his plastic gloves and coat reveal ashy, scaled skin.

“Please, this way.”

He sashays inside. Sam shoots Star a goofy look, shrugs, and follows.

.

.

Edgar had taken Alan up into the green hills surrounding San Cazador. The sea is flat and dark. San Cazador has a kinder sea then Luna Bay, which was wild, green, unforgiving. They perch in the trees and watch their town buzz and break beneath them.

“Do you think Shane will be a problem?” Edgar sits in the hull of branches above him. Alan lies his head back against the oak and smirks.

“No.” He clicks the spurs on his cowboy boots. “Unless he chooses to be.”

“Well if he tries, he’ll have me to deal with.” Edgar snarls and jumps, cat like, to the ground. “He’s been sniffing around us for too long. It’s making me…” He grins at his brother with a mouth full of teeth. “Antsy.”

“An unprovoked attack?” Alan gets to his feet. “I like the sound of that, bro.”

“They’re inbreeds.” Edgar’s old misanthropy is seeping back, bit by bit. His brother was always gifted at avoiding people. The vampirism is a worthy addition in bringing in to its rightful glory. Alan smiles, full and pure. “They’re dragging down the rest of us with their clumsy kills. The hunters are going to be sniffing soon.”

“They have shitty dress sense.”  Says Alan, before hastily following it with; “According to Sam, of course.”

“And the skateboards?” Edgar grunts, pulling back his hair into a masculine ponytail. The blood had rendered his skin smooth as it was when they were teenagers. Alan loves looking at it, how it creases and contorts with Edgar’s new bloodlust, his growing and worthy arrogance hollowing out the marine from yesteryear. “What a load of bullshit. They’re living in the past, and not in a good way.”

Alan nods, thoughtful. Shane’s howling entourage were as thick and careless as the worst sort of fledgling coven. And Shane, posturing with all his fake insight, warbling about “gifts” and “family” as if it meant something to the hideous shark teethed bastards. A shame, maybe. Shane would have been a good recruit, somewhere.

“No he wouldn’t, Alan.” Edgar pulls down Alan’s cowboy hat as he passes, just for effect. Alan half falls over, batting his hands away. “He would have driven you nuts with all his “we’re the chosen” crap and you would have left him lookin’ like lasagne with teeth at the end of the first week.”

“Fuck off.” Alan flips off his hat and runs through a claw through his wild hair. “Just conjecturing, Edgar. You’re too literal and how the _fuck_ did you read my thoughts?”

Edgar grunts.

“Sam has been showing me a few tricks.”

.

.

Star and Sam had ventured past the clinical desk, the rows of kennels where dogs yapped and scrambled at the bars with their paws, muzzles pushed through and lips peeled back.

The basement was a separate world in itself. Star had struggled down the stairs, the drag of her skirt blackened by the filth, and the air was rank with the smell of sulphur.  As they now descended through a hallway lit with nothing but gaslight, Star sticks close to Sam, who whistles _Careless Whisper_ and struts merrily through. Pink silk shirt, blue jeans, and a washed denim trench coat. Star would laugh at the silliness of it all, if it wasn’t for the bang of blood in her ears and the dark that seems to get closer, closer. It’s an old darkness. There are things in it far more dangerous than her.

Why does Sam seem so at home?

“In here.” Dr Wilfbane unlocks a heavy brass door. He steps aside, politely inclining them in. “Step quickly, if you do not mind.”

The room is ancient brick, water dripping from the ceiling and forming puddles on the tiled floor. There are cages built into the walls. Behind the iron bars bizarre clouds of black smoke circulate and spit sparks.

Then, Sam stops dead.

Star, having saved herself from walking into him, peeks over his shoulder.

Sat in a basket, sleepily shaking itself awake, is an Alaskan Malamute puppy. Grey silver tinges its back and upper forehead, but the face and legs are white, and the heart sharped marking on its head makes Star gasp.

“Is that…?”

But Sam is over there in three strides, laughing through his tears, lifting the confused ball of fluff into his arms.

“Nanook! Nanook!”

The dog begins to yip, to bark and struggle, kissing Sam’s face, burrowing into his chest. Sam beams all sweet innocence and Star suddenly, desperately wishes Michael was here. Or Edgar. Edgar should be here.

Dr Wilfbane placidly examines his pocket watch.

“Star!” Sam holds the puppy out to her, his smile so wide it might break his face. “It’s Nanook! He’s back, back with me. Goddamn it, I didn’t think it would work.” He salutes Dr Wilford, who offers a watery half smile. “You’re a genius, sir.”

“I aim to please,” Dr Wilfbane approaches a table, where a contract waits with a ball point pen placed neatly beside it. “I just need to go over some minor details, and then perhaps, we can discuss payment.”

“Whatever you want, sunshine,” And god, Sam is damn near flirting, winking and whistling with the reincarnated Nanook snuggled in his arms. “Just show me where to sign.”

Star watches Sam mutely. Tucking a stray curl behind her ear, she moves away from the two figures by the desk.

A rustling sound begins to creep behind her, prickling her back

A creature, tiny, barely a puppy itself, is squeezing its face through the bars. The little head is badly scarred, and by the looks of things, ill formed. The taupe fur is rugged and naked in places. The eyes burn at her with the same mellow brown light you would find in a forest glen, earth red at their centre. A sepia halo circles its head, a distinctive mark, not unlike a headband.

Star reaches out her hand. It snuffles it, stiffens, as if in memory, and begins to howl, pawing at the bars. Star’s chest clenches, painful, and she jolts, for Dr Wilfbane’s withered hand rests on her shoulder.

“Now, now.” He wags a chicken bone finger at the dog. “No more noise, creature.”

“What is it?” Star asks quietly. Sam is on the floor behind her, tickling Nanook’s belly.

“A failed experiment,” Dr Wilfbane explains dismissively. “A sad little thing, is it not? It’ll soon wear itself out and turn to dust.”

“Dust?” Star’s hands search desperately against the bars for a release, a lock, anything. “So you don’t want him?”

“No.” Dr Wilfbane looks at her curiously. “And you do, little kitten?”

“Yes.” She rises, dusting down her skirt. The dog has stilled, pink nose upturned toward her. “I’ll take him. What payment do you want?”

She feels for her purse, but Dr Wilfbane’s fingers close over her wrist.

“Why, my darling child,” He rolls back his flat, rouge lips, revealing a long slip of a tongue, forked in two directions, lashing suggestively at the aquiline points of his teeth. “You are already part of the payment. I just would require a little more, that is all.”

“What?”  She bites back her gathering hysterics. _“Sam?”_

“Oh, yeah.” Sam stands, petting Nanook’s downy ears. “I forget to mention, Twinkle. He wanted a taste of my blood as payment, but it turns out, half vampire blood is like caviar to his kind. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

Star stares at him, tight lipped. Sam rolls his shoulders and puts on his puppy face to match Nanook’s, all droopy eyed and pouty lipped. She swallows.

“And if I do this, I can keep your failed experiment?”

She points at the silent animal. Dr Wilfbane nods. He reaches up to undo his tie, his irises blacking out the whites of his eyes. Star shivers. She’s taking too long to respond, and Sam’s playful smile melts into a frown.

Star hastily removes her shawl, revealing her shaking wrist, and Wilfbane tuts like a grandfather.

Teeth  - oh god, if you could call them teeth, they were more like walrus tusks! – crack into her neck, crushing down into the bone, and it is like no bite Star had ever had from Edgar. The pain is piping white excoriation, skin and muscle tearing in one go, a wind of blood splattering on her shoulder, her skirt, on the hand that gropes uselessly on the shoulder of the thing that feeds from her. And when he _sucks_ , he takes her energy, her resolve in one long vicious inhale and Star thinks, madly, if this is what death is like, if this is what Edgar was trying to save her from.

He pushes her down, the powerful skeletal crush of his body in an obscene lodge against hers, and he hisses, lapping at her, licking and sucking and closing his monster eyes in ecstasy.

Sam’s ringed hand grabs the back of Wilfbane’s coat and yanks him away. Blood and skin come away with Wilfbane’s mouth, and Star sinks to the floor, clasping her neck, sob after sob hurling from her throat like vomit.

“I think you took a little more then what was agreed, Wilfbane.” All levity is gone. Sam is icy, a growling Nanook at his feet. “It was meant to be a taste, not a fucking downer.”

“Sorry, I just…” Wilfbane whispers, breathlessly, adjusting his tie. Star has never seen so much of _herself_ on another person before. “The sorrow….the sweetness of it. You are in love, are you not?” He gestures to Star, who wishes to god she could just faint and forget all this. “You became a vampire only to become a martyr? A blissful horror, that.”

“I think we’ll be going now, Wilfbane.” Sam collects Nanook, who licks his fingers sweetly. “I have gotta say you’ve successfully freaked me out for the next couple of decades, so congrats for that, bud.”

Star can only look at her hands, earth red, the colour of the dog’s bizarre band of fur. The failed experiment, free from his bars, lumbers out on mismatched paws, and sits beside her. He licks the shaking arch of her fingers, the base of her palm, and lies his head on her skirt.

.

.

The outside is full of the laughter of San Cazador nightlife. It’s as if the world has remained separate and thriving outside of the creatures that slither in the basement of the local dog pound. Sam lets his puppy toddle on the grass, snuffling and sniffing the eerie night bloom of the roses. The body is that of an infant, but his lope over the grass is old and intense and full of memory.

Sam winces at Star’s appearance.

“Jesus, Twinkle. He left you in a state.”

The moonlight shows the full ruin of her ordeal. Her skin isn’t healing so quickly; the saliva from Wilfbane’s gaping mouth stings acid on the open wound. Her top is ripped, revealing her left breast, and she fails to cover herself with the smoky gauze of her shawl. Her white skirt is filthy, lace hanging in tatters. San Cazador, Nanook, the roses; it all spins. Sam steadies her, human in his kindness. It takes everything to stop Star weeping at the sight.

“It’s ok, Star. I’ll take you back, get you cleaned up.” He can’t feed her from his wrist. Edgar has forbidden it. Star is his charge, his responsibility. Star can only imagine what Sam’s blood, untainted by feeding, would taste like. Cream milk chocolate and citrus, smooth and light and delicious. He reads her mind, as easy as blinking, and chortles.

“Not far off, Star,” He lifts her carefully. Star keeps her distance, to prevent the spoil of his beautiful clothes. He shrugs in response. She is too weak to keep him from her mind. Nanook licks her ankle. Dust, her saved hellhound, watches stonily.

The flight back is a testament to Sam’s legendary speed. Nanook yips and lolls his tongue in the breeze. Sam smiles at Nanook as if he is complete again. Star, feeling utterly pathetic, wonders that maybe it was worth it after all.

Dust nips her wrist, drawing blood.

.

.

“Go out and feed, Sam.”

Hot water had left Star clean, her hair refreshingly damp on her wrecked shoulder. She limps across the room, a towel around her legs. She’s topless, but this is Sam, after all. None the less, she wraps her shawl across her shoulders for modesty, and gets into bed. She is hungrier then she has been in years, weaker than before Michael. Dust coils into her stomach. In the overhead light, he is an ugly, stout thing, balding and blunt eyed. But Star trickles her fingers across his head. She sighs and half sinks into sleep. “You need to feed. You get grouchy.”

“I know.” Sam stands. He’s being very sensitive right now and Star can’t help but feel warm. “I just wanted to see you back here, safe. Sleep it off, hm?”

“I can’t do much else, Sam.”

“Yeah.” He fondles her curls. Star curls further down into the bed. “By the way, thanks Twinkle. I appreciate it.”

Star smiles through the pain.

.

.

Shane is on the beach, a campfire lit and licking at the sky. Him and his boys, nicknamed the Tribe or some other hippy shit, sit on their surfboards with the bodies of their latest kills burning away. Post adolescent females; tanning cream, flower body spray, chapstick. Alan can smell it over the smouldering blackened twists of bone and gristle. These fledglings never feasted on anything that wasn’t young or female. What a limited imagination. They were possibly too scared to even touch each other without something with breasts glued to their teeth.

 “We can smell the death from there,” Edgar gestures to the overhang of the cliffs. “We heard the screams, the carnage, the whole lot of it. And I bet you we weren’t the only ones.”

Edgar stands in front of Alan, glowering out at the world. Just like old times.

“Come on, now,” Shane is leant against his surfboard, expression dozy, intently laid back. “We know we’re in no danger. Anyway, we’re staring at the last hunters. I don’t think you’re no longer qualified to handle garlic or any sort of blessed anointment material.”

A rumble of laughter. Alan picks at his teeth with his nail.

“Look…” Edgar is reasonable, stepping forward, hand held up in a truce. Shane props himself up, interested. “Your messy kills are drawing attention. Word is there’s a hunter around here somewhere, and he’s come because you haven’t kept your coven under control. Now what I say is this. You leave, we have no more trouble, and Alan and I will eradicate the hunter. Because he’ll follow your kills all along the coast until he finds your nest, and it’ll be hellfire for all of you.”

Edgar is offering a choice. He’s good that way, his brother. Still has a rusty sense of honour somewhere, and that thrills Alan, because Edgar would not be Edgar if he didn’t have that.

Shane doesn’t take the bait. He sighs, fiddles with his jade pendant, and Alan remembers Sam asked Edgar if he would be sweet enough to swipe that for him. And the way he had asked for it too, leaning forward on the bed, wheedling Edgar, fingers drawing circles on Edgar’s cheeks. Edgar’s face had gotten visibly hot and Sammy had perked, biting Edgar’s lip and making him groan, melt. Sam loves seeing the shreds of humanity still left in Edgar, those small bits of emotional shrapnel dangling like broken skin on a flesh wound. Alan smiles at the thought.

Edgar slaps his back to keep his attention. Alan peeks from under his cowboy hat and smirks at Edgar.

“No.” Oh yeah, Shane is still there. “I won’t be threatened by you. You think you’re better than us, but you’re wrong.”

“That’s the kicker,” Alan steps forward. Edgar steps back. Playtime is over, unfortunately. The other boys fidget at Alan’s approach. Shane doesn’t, but he leans his head back, frowning. “We’re not. And I’m going to make you regret not taking my brother’s more than generous offer, which was more than deserved for a pile of inbred hick frat boys who are in over their head.”

A nervous howl breaks among the boys.

“Hey,” A jumpy blonde waves at Alan. He mentally calls him bargain basket Paul. “Why don’t you blow me, Frog? Huh? Or blow your brother? We all know you want to, sick fuck.”

Their laughter is a rupture on Alan’s patience. Edgar’s face darkens. They exchange glances in their mutual meeting of the eyes.

The blonde barely has time to react before Alan latches his fingernails into his eyeballs, splitting the retina, pushing through until he feels the pulp of blood and brain.  The blonde screams, high and deadly, swiping at him uselessly, but his head crunches like a snail shell, fragile skull pulsing meat through its fractures. Alan drops the still flailing body, kicking it back into the flames.

The other two boys hiss, clawing back to their sire, who watches, passive. Their stares rest on Alan, who licks the spoil on his claws and grimaces, spitting it out on the sand.

“Tastes like shit,” He grumbles. “And I’ve feasted on enough Head Vampires to know what the good stuff is, and that is _shit.”_

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Shane warns. He possibly thinks he’s intimidating in a wet suit with two fledglings acting as hard men behind his back. Cute. “You’re gonna make me do something I really didn’t want to do.”

Edgar breaches the backs of the two fledglings with driftwood snapped sharp over his knee. They barely have time to yell before Edgar’s promised hellfire rips the meat from their bones.

Shane turns, sharply, to look at Edgar, who stalks over the sand, stopping barely inches from his surfboard. Shane vamps in warning, only to find Alan on his left side, who tips his hat in farewell.

It’s a beautiful thing when they work in tandem, when they carry Shane over the sea and slit him sideways, muscles and organ and blood separating like jelly pulled apart by teenage fingers. They drink his blood, feel the salt and booze and power of twenty years previous, when an unlucky surfer was left to mutate beside the Santa Carla bonfires. They taste David, they taste Surf Nazis, which are bitter with an aftertaste that sickens the belly, they taste newsprint and paper torn by bullies, they taste the hate of the thieves with ugly hair and angry tattoos –

Alan has told Edgar that the more Head Vampires they slaughter, the more they feed on their blood, the more powerful they shall become. Alan killed many before he turned Edgar, even before he turned Sam. Speaking of Sam, he shall sit tonight and suckle from Alan’s wrist, so the gift is shared.  

They drop his remains in the forest. The sun shall rise and eat up the cursed flesh. They are both sated, drunk on Shane’s blood, and Alan will never get over how perfect Edgar looks during the hunt, how concentrated and ruthless. Alan bites his tongue and kisses Edgar’s mouth, mingling Shane, their shared history, between them. Edgar closes his eyes, endures it, and breaks it quickly just as Alan smiles.

“Did you get the pendant for Sam?” Alan had made sure he smashed the surfboards to pieces. Any shaping that wasn’t Edgar’s was terrible, anyway.

“Yeah.” Edgar pats his pocket. They both feel the night winding to a close. The sun is coming closer in the hemisphere, rolling away the clouds, the hours till dawn.

Alan winds his arm around Edgar, who exhausted by the full throttle of the blood – still a young one, in so many ways – rests against his chest.

It was time to go home.

As they fly back to their nest, Alan observes Edgar playing with the jade charm. Sammy always loved tokens from the kills of the Frog Brothers. It meant he was always somewhere on their minds, typical of the self possessed son of a bitch.

 


	2. A Frankenstein Of Desire

It is dawn, for the light through her blinds is sickening pastel. Star hears Sam and Edgar, the shuffle of Nanook around their ankles, surprise and delight and explanations, hot in the air.

And then, Edgar’s ceremonial footsteps, outside her door.

Dust’s ears perk and he barks. Star cuddles him into her, a soothing pet on his haunches, before she staggers up and dutifully closes the blinds. Sunlight is unforgiving on her scars, thin threads of blotchy white and black, webbed down her neck and across her breast. She swallows, letting the bed sheet fall, and there she sees the bruises run dark beneath her belly, on the bump of her hip, scratches wracked on her thigh.

Edgar stands at the door, the plumpness from his kill doing nothing to ease the shock on his face.

“What the fuck?” He shouts, and Star shrinks from his anger, curling herself back into the dark. But Edgar lives in the dark, and his gaze soaks up every mar in her body, and he swears, guttural, and his hands are on her, too abrasive, too hard, turning her over as if she was a kitten carried in by the rain.

It _hurts._

“Edgar…”

“What happened?” He mutters, but Star doesn’t answer, just curves her arms around his shoulders and loosely lies her head on his jacket. Edgar pulls back, one arm tight on Star’s waist, the other jerking his shirt open. Edgar’s skin is soft beneath her teeth as she breaks through, blood bubbling in her mouth, and she drinks, desperate, trying to be gentle even as Edgar hisses with the discomfort. But he’s hard, Star can feel it, and as she stops, as the wounds knit together neatly, she slides her quivering fingers down his chest as she drops to her knees.

Edgar pulls her up, too firm, and shakes his head.

“No.” He holds her face, thumbs dipped into the curve of her mouth. She hiccups, sniffs. “No Star, you don’t have to do that.”

He hugs her. They never hugged, not even in the stale safe years spent in the trailer. Star is, for a moment, stricken. But this is Edgar, and his new unlife has torn away all inhibition, restraint, denial. His nose touches her hairline, his blood awake with his rugged affection.

He never touches her, kisses her, in the presence of Alan and Sam. If anything, she is a sister, nothing more. Only in the little dressing room with the soft peach light and the blinds shut is where he touches her, moves in her, is with her. It is reserved only for them, that small space of eternity, where she can study the press of his weight on the bed and wonder where it all went wrong, but maybe it hasn’t. At times like this, she can trick herself otherwise.

He takes her to bed, allows her to feed until her scars are healed, until she is whole and sleepy in his arms.

“I’m gonna kill Sam,” He snarls into her shoulder, even as she laughs lightly. Edgar has secretly entered her mind, ridden the memory of Wilfbane to a tingle at the base of her brain. She is too exhausted to feel scared by this, to consider its wider ramifications. David never touched her mind, just let her writhe and squirm in her uncharted bloodlust, let her taste the night and yet never let herself consume it.

“You should have seen Sam with Nanook,” Star rolls on her back so his head lies on her chest. She strokes his hair dolefully, a subdued worship. She wonders if these ticks in her behaviour are the tie between sire and fledgling or are her own frayed feelings. Edgar relaxes in her arms. “He was so happy. It was great.”

“Yeah.” Edgar sighs. “Alan hates adorable things. He’ll prefer the pup when it hits puberty.”

Dust paces the bedroom, agitated by Edgar. He’ll get used to it, Star thinks, apologetic. She’s apologetic for everything now, a fact she can’t purge herself of.

“You know,” Edgar’s speech rumbles against her skin and she trembles, for he moves up to stare at her, possessive. “This is why you need me to protect you, Star. Why you need us.”

He searches her face carefully and Star can’t hide her confusion.

“I can protect myself,” She says, irritated, even if she doesn’t mean to say it.

Edgar grins, indulgent.

“Sure you can, Star.” He kisses just under her chin. A hint of fang, testing her. “But remember. Only I can protect you, ok? Don’t let anyone or anything else bite you. Sam was stupid to barter you but because it’s Sam…”

“You love Sam,” She whispers. As if he had ability to refuse anything Sam asked of him.

“Yeah,” Edgar pauses, sucking in an optional breath. “But nobody bites you, feeds you, except me.” He holds up his finger, as if in mid lecture. Star resists nipping it playfully. “I should rip that thing apart for what it did, whatever the fuck it was.”

Star says nothing. She kisses Edgar, tastes Shane, and sleeps.

.

.

Star had woken that night to a pile of parcels arranged prettily at the end of the bed. A smoky quartz skirt with a woven belt, seashell chandelier earrings, a pristine white lace camisole. And even better, a collar for Dust, with a Harvest Moon tag. Sam had been busy.

Dust scratches at his new accessory. His fur is growing through thick, his body fife and less mangled. Still a puppy, still big enough for Star to pick up and kiss. He grumbles, licking her face, shaking the unwanted collar.

Shane’s essence from Edgar’s lips is a rich intoxicant. Star stretches out, feeling fierce in her new threads. She retains the sweet ease in her mind from Edgar’s mental manipulation. She feels sick, suddenly, the euphoria blistered with a stab of dread. When had he learned to do that? Had he done it before, as she slept? Had he…?

Dust scrabbles at the door, impatient.

No.

Edgar was not like that.

She opens the door, greeting the dark. Dust yips and bolts out into the fresh air.

Edgar _is_ not like that.

.

.

San Cazador, a hip seaside town with hip fashions and hip people. Star swans through it, Dust at her heels. How many more years will they stay there? It’s the hunting ground for their coven, but every town they entered Alan deemed his property. Give Alan a map and he’d navigate his geographical bloodlust. But San Cazador has housed them for five years. Soon, Alan’s reputation will catch up to them, Star is sure, but at the moment she likes it. She passes by the Bookener. Zoe waves at her from inside the window.

She likes it a lot.

“Hey.” Star leans against the doorframe, fingers tapping by her cheek, marine jacket hung from her shoulder. Dust trots in, uninvited. “I hope your shop allows dogs.”

Star looks good tonight, and she knows it. Sam’s ensemble and Shaun’s blood makes her glow, draws attention like a magnet. It’s not as strong as a full vampire, but it’s enough to run hearts and lure victims. Not that Star plans that, at all.

“Oh god, is he yours?” Zoe holds out her hand to Dust, who sniffs it. He grants Star a weary look, and rolls dutifully on his back. “He’s cute!”

Whatever magic had bound Dust to her was doing its work. Dust’s fur is thicker, darker, the colour of blueberries.

“He’s a rescue,” Star still stands just out the doorway. “He’s called Dust.”

“Can I pick him up?”

“Sure.”

Dust arranges himself in Zoe’s arms. He sniffs at the air, at Zoe, and is for a moment, stills. He snuffles her neck, her chest, and coyly licks the end of her nose.

“Star, you can come in, you know.”

Star’s teeth gleam as she passes over the threshold, reflected in every mirror. Dust barks, scrabbling playfully at Zoe, attempting a string of long, underdeveloped howls.

“Dust, cut it out,” Star pets his head. “There’s no moon in here.”

It’s a stupid joke, but Zoe giggles. Star’s hand moves from Dust’s head to ghost on Zoe’s shoulder.

“When are you off tonight?” Star asks. “I want to pierce your ears, you know.”

“You said.” Zoe releases Dust, fiddling self-consciously with her earlobes. “Why?”

“It’ll suit you, is all.” Hot metal piercing tender skin. Star feels thirsty. “It’s ok, I’m qualified.”

“I’m off in half an hour.”

 Across the road is a vendor selling sterling silver jewellery. Star slips out, leaving Dust snoozing on the sill.

.

.

Ah, yes. Fresh meat, fresh air. Sam extends his arms and embraces it all. A personal buffet tonight, made all the more magical by the presence of Nanook at the foot of his designer sneakers and his boyfriend – he never tires of that word, god he will never tire of saying it, out loud and especially in front of Alan – beside him.

Edgar, all prettied up in black, still with that touch of military chic. He scowls at Sam, at the flirtatious blasts of colour shared between them like a hit of fine wine. Even with burrowed blood, Edgar can blush something fierce.

“What do you fancy tonight, hm?” He butts his head against Edgar’s neck, lips curving at Edgar’s shiver. “Surfers? Executives? Retailers?”

“Haven’t decided yet.” Edgar was scanning the crowds, seizing up the latest arrivals. The square rushed with families in summer shorts, dogs and children in tow. Nothing that suited Edgar’s taste, too domestic and easy and suburban. He grunts. “Nothing strikes the fancy.”

“Oh?” Sam winks at a passing couple. “Nothing? No-one?” He spreads his lips, showing his teeth. “How about me?”

Edgar groans.

“Now? Really?” He checks his watch. “Jesus, Sam. You’re insatiable.”

“Natural predator, bud.” Sam is advancing, blurring Edgar back into the alleyway. Edgar exhales, his back hitting the bricks, and Sam opens Edgar’s jacket, palming his chest beneath his t-shirt, feeling the tensions and toning of years spent hunting and beyond. All his, now. Adolescent fantasies were practically greyscale in comparison to the real thing. Edgar’s ribs swell with stimulated breath and Sam kisses, bites, under his heart, and Edgar _bucks._

_“Sam…”_

“Easy. I’ve got you.”

Sam suckles, feeling the juice smear across his skin. He rises up, drawing his forefinger down Edgar’s cheek. Edgar is staring at him, stern, but his lips are trembling and Sam sighs, sweetly indulgent, delighted that Edgar needs him like this.

“I…” Edgar swallows. Sam is reflected in his iris, swollen out to the pupil. Vampires reflect in each other, and Sam has always been in Edgar, even if once upon a time he had tried so hard to deny it. “I had another dream, about…before…”

“Aw, Edgar.” Sam shrugs, standing back. Edgar holds on to him. A delicious thrill runs down Sam’s spine.  “It happens to all of us. You just have it a bit worse. It’ll pass.”

“I thought it would been gone now.” Edgar sounds broken.

“Isn’t it easier?” Sam strokes his cheek. “You’re doing so well, Edgar. Alan and I, we’re so proud, bud.”

It’s a patronising thing to say, but Edgar folds in at the words. He pulls Sam close. Sam caresses his hair, his back, his neck. His teeth puncture the skin there and Edgar stiffens, exposing his neck further.

“So well.” Sam whispers in his ear. “So well, bud. You’re here, with us.  Alan and I, we’ve got you. Need you, _love_ you. Especially me, Edgar.” He nips his lobe. “I waited so long for you, Edgar. We waited.”

Edgar kisses him, maybe just to shut him up. Like all things with Edgar, it’s odd and testing in its tenderness. Edgar’s fingers brush Sam’s lower stomach and Sam smirks.

“Anxious, are we?”

“Fuck you, Sambo.”

“Gladly.”

As rough as Edgar looks (considerably better dressed, Sam thinks proudly) he never bites Sam unless invited, and pants and jolts as Sam finds his way into his jeans, parting the zipper and feeling the bulge of heat within, working Edgar slow, seeking each vulnerability and twisting it mental and physical, for he is damn good for matching his hands with the pleasure thrumming in Edgar’s mind.

Edgar spills in his jeans, and his bitten back cry is nulled by the velvet brush of Sam’s lips on his cheek, on the hand cradling his head.

“I…” Edgar starts, can’t quite finish.

Sam sniggers.

“What?”

“I lo…”

Edgar clips it off, but Sam senses the echo tremoring in Edgar’s brain.

Sam _looks_ at him, saucer eyed.

It is as if he has passed the gulf to this man, as if everything left behind was empty, useless. A world as dry and stale as sunlight, but to hear it, to actually hear it…!

He smiles like he used to, and oh god, it is wonderful to make Edgar breathless at the sight of him, of him! Sam laughs, laughs as Edgar blooms beetroot and tries to swat his hands away, as if they are teenagers again bunched awkwardly together in tents and sleepovers. Sam is not letting him go, not now, not ever.

“It’s nothing, really,” Edgar mumbles like a child. This whole display is an affront to masculine ego. “Sam, stop…S-Sam…”

“Holy shit!” An obnoxious voice breaks the moment. Sam hisses in irritation, wiping his mouth. Edgar freezes, not quite recovered. Sam offers Edgar a crooked half smile as he empathically zips up his fly.

The man who stands in the wake of the alley is an early 30 something, brawny enough for the both of them, generic jock good looks twisted in disgust. A heavyset side kick, armed with a camera, tries in vain to hide himself behind the back of this gormless goliath.

Ah, _yes._

“Lars Van Goetz!” Sam needles the name from the man’s mind. So easy when his victim’s brain is maggoty by his own ego and the size of a peach seed to boot. A has been reality star, so quaint. Sam sidles up, charm clicking into place, glamour honeying the air and helping the confusion off Lars’s face. “Gotta say, big fan. When you wrestled that grizzly bear? Amazing stuff, bud. End of my seat, it had me.”

It’s a sweet delusion, and one this blood bucket is used to. Hell, it’s what he’s based his entire (now short lived) career. Lars relaxes, swanning out his arms in an easy shrug, flexing as he goes. Heavy chested, steroid pumped, gym worshipper kind of guy. The sort that fancies underage groupies. Ah, yeah, Sammy is gonna enjoy this kill.

“Oh, well,” He says. “It was nothing to a guy like me. There is no natural predator in this world that can take down Lars Van Goetz.”

“Natural, huh?” Sam pokes his teeth into his gums. “Hey, I believe you, bud. Wow…” He tilts his head to peek impishly at the man hunched behind Lars. Claus is the name he picks out. This mind is more closed on this guy, tight with common sense. “Are you filming now? Am I going to be famous?”

“Well, uh…” Lars irritatingly waves at Claus, who snaps the camera and stuffs it into his bag. “We were just getting stock shots, but we’ll…” Lars sucks his molars as Edgar approaches behind Sam. “We’ll be cutting some stuff out.”

Claus nods quickly, as if just to verify that fact.

Sam slaps Lars’s back in a way that is purposely heterosexual.

“I think I owe you a drink,” He clicks his tongue behind his lips. “What do you say?”

“I, uh…” Lars fidgets, glancing nervous at Sam’s earring in a way the lug obviously thinks is subtle. “We’ve got…places to be, right Claus?”

“Right.” Claus tugs at his collar. “Yeah, we’ve got that editing…thing.”

Sam pouts. He boldly places his palms flat on Lars’s chest and pushes, lightly. It’s barely a speck of his supernatural strength but enough to send Lars flailing back. Sam’s thirst ripples the air, pulsing suggestive into Lars’s brain.

“Come on now, I’m a big fan. I’d love to hear what goes on behind the scenes!”

Lars blinks, glazed. Claus is concerned.

“Sure,” Lars grins like a twelve year old. Hah. Poor sap. “I always have time for my fans.”

.

.

He sticks out like a sore thumb, as hunters do, much like Edgar did. Black combat gear, a beanie hat despite the heat. He is perfectly average in face and body, but his scrutiny is intense and suspicious and fixed entirely on her.  Star ignores him, tearing her eyes from his black blot in the crowd, paying for her purchases and moving away.

“Hey.” He pushes through the crowd, shoving surfers and holiday makers to the side. Star picks up her feet. Her fear pricks her senses and she scents him, wood shavings and gasoline and gunpowder, garlic a waft on his breath and hands. He’s a hunter alright. “Hey, lady, I wanna talk to you!”

_Lady…_

She can’t move too fast, can’t steal through the people at lightening pace or take to the air. She’s a half, her powers mid formed. A clumsy escape would rise alarm in the crowds, would determine she was exactly what he thought she was.

“Hey!” He grabs at her jacket, pulling her sharply to his side. Beneath his baggy military gear, he is disturbingly strong.  Up close to him, to the sweat glimmering on his Adams apple, to his blackberry eyes and trimmed goatee, to his pallid skin hanging just soft on his bones, it’s like looking into the past. She stares at him, hypnotised, as if he is a powerful vampire. His hard humanity, the anti-social compassion, all real, all too naïve and here in her hands. “Don’t run. You’ll make it worse for yourself. I don’t want to hurt you, if I don’t have to.”

Dust crushes down on his ankle. The hunter yells, kicking out his leg. Dust reels back, blood on his muzzle, and the smell of it, old world trailers and papercuts, is a powerline to her hunger. She tries to run, but he grips her skirt, a handful of gauzy glitzy material, and tugs, nearly ripping it from her belt.

“Hey!” A man swings at the hunter. A group of women mill around him, dragging him back, handbags and stilettos raised in offense. “You leave that girl alone, you creep!”

Star breaks free, and falls right into Zoe, her long winsome arms closing around her and keeping her there. Zoe, who had watched from the Bookener, Zoe who had raised the alarm, Zoe who comforts a tearful monster.

“I…”

“You ok? Look, let’s get out of here.”

Zoe leads her from the square, past the Bookener, into the apartment that sits above.

.

.

Neon lights, pink tiled floors, booths with white plastic tables. Lars sits in front of a tiered double chocolate sundae, Claus nursing a black coffee. Edgar sits back, an untouched croissant in front of him, swinging his leg back and forth in a sulk. Sam sucks hard on his strawberry milkshake, winking at Lars. Edgar’s eye twitches.

Sam knows he is but an unbroken series of successful social pleasantries, ideal for charming victims into bed and breakfast. (Edgar was the bed, Lars was the breakfast.)  Claus keeps looking at his watch, rubbing his knee, gagging on his coffee as Edgar slides his croissant across the table to him.

“Don’t want it.” He says, gruff. Claus gulps and bobs his head like a nodding dog. Nanook’s head peeks up, sniffs the plate, and the croissant is gone is a single gulp. Edgar barely reacts, just stares Claus down.

Lars has boasted out all his stuffing, descending simple into Sam’s wiles. Edgar is getting considerably angrier, hungrier, especially as Sam makes a point of rolling his gaze slow and warm down Lars’s body. The hours are ticking close to midnight.

“Well,” Lars pats his stomach. He doesn’t reach for his wallet. What a gent. “Well boys, it’s been great. But we should be going.”

Sam pulls up fast. He swings an arm around Lars’s shoulder.

“Lets us walk you to your car.” Sam is so good at being patient. Edgar, not so much, who shoves Claus back down in the booth.

“You, stay here.” Edgar’s mental powers are subpar but they are enough to keep the big man seated. Claus is clever, and so Claus is going to live tonight. With the bill, of course. “Finish your coffee.”

Nanook licks his crumb stained nose and sniffles a dazed Claus, before trotting out between the swinging doors.

By the time Edgar catches up, Lars is drowsy beneath Sam, slurring words that sound more like refusals. Ironically enough, they are at Lars’s car, a vintage sport with a custom job that would give Alan a headache.

Sam is patting Lars’s cheek, feigning worry.  Lars smacks his hand from his face.

“Look man, I mean no offense, ok?” Lars kicks at Sam’s legs, who makes a show of tumbling backwards, craning in hurt. “But I’m not a fa…”

That’s all it takes. Edgar roars, cramming his fists _up_ into Lars’s chest, jamming poly cotton nightmare into the flesh junk of Lars’s abdominals.  Lars wheezes, coughs bile and lung. Edgar slashes down, bringing the rest of Lars’s organs with it, and tears the rest apart with his teeth.  Sam bobs nearby, cheekily finishing the rest of his strawberry milkshake.

All that is left of Lars is a pair of broad shoulders and an airheaded expression. Perfect, poetic even.

Edgar steps back. He is licked in Lars from head to toe. He looks down at his hands, nails long, dangling with sinew and tendon. Yum.

Sam whistles, bouncing over.

“Nice,” Sam whispers in Edgar’s ear. Edgar, who has just fed yet his face is bloodless. “Real nice.”

Edgar cracks, snapping Sam up by his coat lapels and backing him into the alleyway beside the empty diner. Sam vamps in response, wrapping his legs firm around Edgar’s waist and diving for his hands, slurping the blood from Edgar’s fingers, hands, cheeks, chin.  Edgar remains human even as Sam snacks on him, marble skin and sunshine hair, looking like the prettiest demon this side of California.

“Oh yeah,” Sam rumbles, demonic echo livening Edgar’s reluctant response in his pants. “That’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I need, right here…”

“Sam…” Edgar sounds broken again. Aw. “What the hell did I…what did you…”

“All you, bud.” Sam is popping open Edgar’s jeans, using the soles of his shoes to shimmy them down to the ground. Edgar struggles, for a brief moment, but Sam locks his legs insistent around Edgar, thrusting up and against him. Sam rides his own trousers down, keeping his nails stuck into Edgar’s neck to keep him there, and guides Edgar’s fingers into him, who trembles at the heat of Sam’s body. This is all the warmth they’ll ever get, and rightfully, it’s between them. “I want it _rough.”_

Edgar stumbles, too gentle, and Sam whines like a spoilt child and vaults Edgar down against the grind of the tarmac. He prepares himself quick, and sinks into Edgar, who jerks, arching off the ground, hands stuttering on Sam’s thighs, trying and failing to keep steady.

Sam rides him raw. He wants him to feel this, feel them, feel that surge of protection and jealousy and rage that had sprouted Lars’s colon through his teeth. Edgar has his head to the side, arm over his eyes, teeth gritted. He still hasn’t fanged. He never can, can he? Not to Sam, not to his Sam.

Sam has no such quarrel. He’s fully transformed, thumb pushed hard against Edgar’s jaw, encouraging Edgar’s spare hand to jerk him. Edgar does, bless his heart, still resilient in his gentleness, and Sam ruts against him, prodding Edgar’s mind until it floods open to him, and Edgar falls, cries, shakes, and floods Sam in response.

Witnessing Edgar’s bliss is enough to finish Sam. He sighs, unwinds, and places his head on Edgar’s shoulder. Edgar’s eyes are puffy, swollen red at the edges. He sniffs, deeply, breaking out a single cracked sob. Sam shushes him, flinching at the wounds cut deep and long in Edgar’s neck. Maybe he did get a bit carried away.

Nanook sits at the end of the alleyway, eyeing them disapprovingly.

“Oh Jesus,” Edgar face palms as Sam begins to laugh, coquettishly kicking up his back legs. “Don’t tell me the dog was _watching_.”

“He had a front row seat, Edgar.”

“This is so humiliating.”

“Yeah.” Alan observes above, hobnail boots tapping the slating of the diner roof. He leans over the satellite dish, bemused. “I should say so.”

Alan’s growing snigger is only picked up by Sam, as Edgar groans and throws Sam’s discarded jeans over his face. When Alan isn’t looking, Sam pecks away his tears like a mother bird, until Edgar’s face is clean and pure in the moonlight, and the light fills Edgar’s eyes like a cat’s.

.

.

Zoe’s apartment is tiny, an arrangement of one big box (the lounge) and three smaller boxes attached (bathroom, kitchen, bedroom.) The floor is bare boards, but Zoe has scrubbed the damp from the corners and lined the lounge in cheap, colourful rag rugs. A bookcase stuffed full of books, discs and comics, a television with a VHS and DVD built in, retro by Star’s standards.

Zoe patters about, arranging cushions on the threadbare couch, and Star floats in, Zoe’s invitation a sweetened supernatural promise. Star places her bag on the table top. Dust digs at the rugs, nipping at black hairs spun dark into the weave.

“Do you have a kettle?”

“Yeah, sure. Just in the kitchen. Do you want something to eat? I’ve got…” Zoe sticks her nose in the cupboards. “…biscuits. Popcorn. Or do you want pizza? I can call out for pizza.”

Star approaches Zoe, reaching past her arm to flick on the kettle. Zoe doesn’t blink, just spills her teeth in a larger grin, and Star’s neck prickles, not altogether unpleasantly. But the moment is gone, for Zoe is rooting through her purse for the number for the local take away and so Star sits on the couch, fanning her skirts around her, and places the new earrings on the coffee table.

Zoe enters, the flame cooked needle kept hot in a saucer of boiled water. Star sits up, and pats the space beside her.

“I got you a few options.” Star hopes her choices were poppy enough for Zoe. Silver Batman studs, dangly wolf charms, punk purple butterflies. Zoe rubs her hands together, bouncing down beside Star, face lighting up. “They’re all yours, by the way. So you can have a selection.”

“Can I pay you for these?”

“No, of course not! It’s a gift. Just wear them.” Star’s forefinger and thumb rub Zoe’s lobes. The blood is thin there, close to the skin. “I’ve never known someone who can have such a quirky style yet neglect their ears.”

Zoe flicks Star’s multiple piercings.

“And that is something you haven’t done, Star! How do I know you weren’t turn me into a Christmas tree?”

Star had lived through an era of good looking boys with mismatched earrings. It had been a mark of David’s coven, pretty and tortured and dangerous with their individual staple hanging from their ear. Twisted metal and black for David, dagger for Paul, shark tooth for Dwayne, skull for Marko.

Batman for Zoe.

Star disinfects the needle, numbs Zoe’s ear, and pushes the needle through sharp and quick. The skin hollows, swells, reddens and Star salivates. Quickly, she clips the earring down and turns away, reaching for Zoe’s second choice, the punk butterfly, and finishes the second ear with her gaze fixated on the wall behind Zoe, which has a poster for _The Howling._

Zoe jumps up to look in the mirror, swinging her head to and fro.

“It suits you,” Star says a little queasily, and not for the reasons Zoe might think.

“I love it!” Zoe waves at her in the mirror. “Are you sure I can’t pay you back?”

“Seeing you with earrings is enough. You’re complete, finally!” Star isn’t good with words, out of practice with the social scene, her voice an awkward blight when she speaks, and everything seems too loud. Even her gesture is closed, insecure. But Zoe is easy and bright and too trusting, and Star tries teasing. “Haven’t you promised me pizza?”

“Yeah, of course!” Zoe passes Star and the aroma of forests and freedom is too much to bear, and her arms ache to reach for Zoe, to bury her head in her firm belly and bite. But the thought plays uninterrupted in her mind as Zoe examines the bookcase. “Do you fancy a movie?”

They spend the evening as normal young women, cheap pizza cheese oozing from their mouths and popcorn and crumbs stuck under the settee, and Star watches young old actors on the television scene and knows that she is like that, frozen in an eternal script. Feed, sleep, wander. But Zoe is there, biting her fingers to stop laughing at a special effect that looks like the pepperoni left in the box, and yes, this is more than bearable. This is nice.

Zoe reaches for Star. Star can’t breathe in that moment, the moment made long by the rise of Zoe’s hand and the fact there is no hesitation as it comes to rest on her shoulder, caressing up to her ears, and Star feels silver clip behind her lobe.

The other Batman earring sparkles in the shade of Star’s hair and Zoe wiggles her shoulders, patting her own piercing like a kid’s pinky promise.

Star blushes and touches the stud, still warm from Zoe’s hands, the faint scorch of Zoe’s blood.

Zoe reaches for a piece of cold pepperoni, and nibbles it with her sharp, sharp teeth.

.

.

 

 The hunter is waiting for her in the alley.

It’s nearly dawn. Star is exhausted, hungry, yearning for her dressing room. Dust yawns, and curls by her feet.

“Your name is Star, right?” He holds up a cross chain necklace. Star looks at it warily. “What kind of name is that?”

“What’s yours?” Star asks.

“Blake.”

 “What kind of name is that, then?”

Blake frowns. He crosses the distance between them and Star takes a step back.

“You’re a half, aren’t you?” He is cautious, but not by much. Her curls and skirts are hardly threatening. David would be so proud. “You haven’t fed. I’ve been watching you for a while.”

He speaks with admiration. Guilt is a bittersweet texture in Star’s stomach. She looks out at the empty streets, and then back at him.

“Don’t think I’m good.” She says. “I’m not. I’m not good. I’m no different, so leave me alone.”

“I know you’re part of Alan’s coven.” The word Alan is enough to plant a seed of horror in her brain, which will weed her waking hours. She will sleep with thorns in her gums and roots in her veins. She’s seen him now, he’s said a name, and she is going to have to tell. With David, she could remain silent. But in this new family, lies are impossible to tell, and Edgar can now see through her like filtered water. But Blake touches the cleft of her shoulder, and she winces, for he has seen the terror on her face. “I’ve been tracking him. That demon is dangerous.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His expression harshens. She isn’t doing what he wants, isn’t falling humane and soft in his hands, pleading humanity like it isn’t a hope she crowded in the back of her skull years ago. He screws his fists tight on her coat and yanks her close, too close. She can see the blood running like fire ants beneath his skin.

“Look, you’re being stupid,” He’s desperate, an exquisite perfume to her kind. “Can you not see it? Do you know how many they’ve killed? They are insatiable, and it’s not just humans they’re going after, no sir. Head vampires, old Masters, those who have sat on their laurels and now are reaping the price in your boyfriend’s belly.”

Star keeps her lashes lowered.

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“No, funnily enough.” He straightens, loosens his hold but does not release her. “Your little group is too young to be as strong as they are. It’s frightening and sick and I’m going to put an end to it.”

“Are you going to kill me?” She can barely hear herself say it. She never thought she was in danger, but maybe, this is it. A discarded tear glistens on her cheek.

“Not if you help me.” He is so very near, the chip of his tooth millimetres from the curve of her ear still burning from Zoe’s touch. Star looks up at him beneath her lashes. He blinks, bravado fading bit by bit. “I know your human side is still in there.”

Yes, it is. And that’s the problem, for memory breeds her bloodlust in her gut and he is so much like Edgar, before the blood. Morning light crawls across the pavement, the air still and weak, like her heart. A breeze picks up and flutters her curls above and around her face, and this time, he does release her, for the dark of the night remains in her face, in her eyes.

“They’ll kill you,” she warns. “Slowly. Stay away. Hunt elsewhere. And don’t follow me again.”

Shaky flight carries her away, from Blake and her memories.

.

.

By the time Star arrives back, it is hot and dusty daylight and she closes the black iron door behind her in a heart pounding _clang._

The air that greets her is soft and chilly. Star carefully makes her way down, Dust’s nails a staccato clip on the stairs. Everything echoes down here. She’s taught herself to shut off her ears some mornings and afternoons, when Alan is feeling particularly unnatural.

Edgar is waiting for her at the bottom of the stair.

He’s been waiting a while, washed-out at staying up after his sire’s sleep. He leans his weight on one leg, face upturned towards her like an angry angel. Star goes to apologise, a dozen excuses waiting to be plucked from her brain, but Edgar is shaking, and his distress spikes their blood bond, and Star clutches the banister for support, stopped three steps away from him.

“Edgar…” She whispers. “Edgar, are you ok?”

She has long given up asking him _what has happened_ and _what are they doing to you_ or _what have they done to you._ Or more grotesque; _what have you done to me?_

Edgar drops his shoulders, but does not move into her. He doesn’t move away from her either, just stands like a wax candle, as if hoping to melt and evaporate within her stare, within her arms. Star rubs her hands up his arms to his shoulders, ever the caring nursemaid.

“Edgar…”She tries again, and this time he does give in, his nose a flat pressure on her neck, awkwardly loitering his hands on her hips and waist. Even now, he has never learned how to quite touch her.

Edgar was not that interested in sex, or so he had appeared, even when they were both human. Hot blooded as he was, it seemed to stem from violence, forever reeled in and held, white knuckled, in control. He’d always watched her throat, the way it could ripple as she swallowed on her knees in front of him. Throat, mouth, eyes, hands.

Maybe now Edgar has nothing left to lose, nothing more to hide, but he guides her to her bedroom. The blinds are shut, the bed mussed from where he has been waiting. Edgar stinks of death. He has made a most vicious kill tonight and Star doesn’t want the blood has disturbed him so deeply, shaken back his boldness to something withered and sleeping inside.

But the blood stings her tongue with its righteous fury, but Edgar does not toy or tease today. He feeds her, handles her as if she is crystal and prime to break, and Star knows he does it for her because he cannot do it to himself. His pupils are bubbles of rose glass, though he does not bite her, even as he ghosts her straps down her shoulders and she releases her arms, revealing her nudity as an incitement.

Star had thought, stupidly, that Sam could provide the aftercare for Edgar, could be soothing and calm and steadying. Maybe Alan had a tender bone hidden beneath his leather and twilight face. Star believes, no, _knows_ that they love him. But they want to love him in their own way, even if that means dismantling this man, picking him apart piece by piece then shoving him back together, a Frankenstein of their desire.

Why does she have to see this? Soon, very soon, the inflammation occasionally caused by a mild heartburn of humanity will only exist in their peach room, only for her to witness, to feel the crush of. Edgar will get stronger, prouder, more ruthless, a match for his brother and a lover for Sam. And Star, Star will be a dress wearing a face in the doorway, waiting to catch him when that pull of saccharine conscience rears its ugly head.

Soon, Edgar will be like them.

_This_ is why he kept her.

If she turned, would it be easier?

Edgar is asleep, in her shawls and blankets, where he is safe from his nightmares. Star pulls her leg up, sweaty hair frizzy on her neck, bare beneath the black of the room. The twist of her body in the sheets makes him stir, grunting as if irritated, but the touch of his thumb to her earlobe makes her freeze.

“That’s new,” He says, sleepy, but in his face is a shadow of a smile and he thinks she’s wearing it for him, doesn’t he, the silver Batman now cold under his fingers. Star takes his hand away, moderate, and smiles. If she could die of guilt, now would be the time.

“I fed tonight,” He says, slowly, brow heavy. “Some kind of whack job reality star.”

“Did he have it coming?” Star smooths down his chest hair. She has a gift for stealing the weight from words, of stealing away consequence. Why else did she chase Michael?

Edgar snarls. Star shivers.

“He insulted Sam.”

Edgar is feeling better. Star can’t help but feel pitiable in how happy that makes her.

“Then he had it coming.” She confirms. Edgar grunts, satisfied.

Star rolls onto her side, pinching the covers laid flat over Edgar’s chest and hunkering down, her toes brushing the tips of Dust’s fur.

Edgar pauses, before he follows suit, his arm now confident around her middle.

Sleep is taking her down when she feels the tiny bellows of his breath against her hair.

“Hey, Lady. You’re coming with Alan, Sam and me tomorrow.”

Star is suddenly wide awake, fingers cord tight on Edgar’s arm, but he shushes her, much like Sam shushes him.

“It’s alright Star, you don’t have to kill. You know I won’t let you.” He rumbles worn and commanding and Star listens, and can’t get over how much he does not understand. “It’s just so we can keep the bonds between our group fresh, strong. We need trust, Star. More than anything.”

It’s a tribal thing, a group feed, a primal enlivening of the blood that they all share. Her veins itch at the promise. She nods, for it is all she can do, and Edgar, sated and justified, dozes back on the pillow, and Star sleeps with Alan’s thorns in her mouth.

.

.

Blake needs pancakes. No, he _deserves_ pancakes. After the shit storm of last night, he deserves something. His mother would always say in that lilting Betty Crocker voice of hers that a small treat could brighten even the gloomiest of days.

Blake stabs at his pancakes, gloomy just for the spite of it. Plastic machine piped pancakes, fructose sugar strawberry sauce, mass produced glace cherries propped on the side, as if it makes any difference. He used to eat well, used to have filter black coffee and butter croissants with a vial of apricot jam on the side. Brief case and black tie, a little man in a little world of paperwork and filing cabinets and the wish for that illusive Christmas bonus –

Bam. You’re tied to a chair by a bunch of dickheads that look like extras from the Matrix and suddenly the entire world has teeth, even the paperwork has teeth, and thank god he kept his Dad’s penknife tucked in his back pocket, thank god the creature they left him with was weak and ancient and stupid and easy to –

Damn.

He majorly fucked up last night, springing on a cowering half vamp and having the fine point of a stiletto wedged in his skull. Maybe he should have stayed home in his razor wire camp with _Frasier_ repeats and tinned beans and the occasional stake out when the trail got hot. Alan Frog and his cronies have the nasty habit of packing shop when the hunters come sniffing, but this is one hunt he isn’t going to let turn chilly.

He chews forcefully.

It’s a messy job, but someone has got to do it. And it’s the right thing.

He swallows for extra emphasis.

It _is._

A big guy is wandering around the tables, looking lost, camera bag slung and slipping off his shoulder. Blake lowers his fork.

“Eh…” The man lingers near Blake’s table. Takes off his baseball cap and plays with it, as if he’s in detention. “Hey, you haven’t seen a guy around here, muscular with short hair and wearing an Evil Dead t-shirt, have you?”

Blake is impassive.

The poor lamb hesitates.

“He…went missing. Last night.” The camera man massages his temples, squinting in the light. “Or at least I think he did. It’s…it’s really confusing. I can’t…”

The symptoms are obvious. Glazed eyes, wandering like a babe in the woods, headache.  Blake lies down his cutlery, stuffs two dollar bills in the tip box, and gets up.

“Just answer me one question.” Blake was never a military man, but he can fool himself on the occasion. “Who was he last seen with?”

.

.

Sam is awake, occupying the silence of two bodies as opposed to their natural three.

Alan smokes spirals in the dark. The shape that is Sam edges over until the fragrance of hairspray is pungent. Sam always smells overly sweet, as if he’s rotting cherries in his gut.

“He’s not coming down today, is he?” Sam needn’t say it. He alone has enough mental prowess s to gauge an entire concert stadium like some sort of starved emotional battery. But Sam has to say it, if only to see the shake of Alan’s head.

Sam unbuttons Alan’s shirt down to the navel, and presses his palm to Alan’s non beating heart.

“Reminds me of old times,” He says, low, like a lullaby.

.

.

 “Lars Van Goetz?” Blake circles the diner, Claus in tow. “Isn’t he some has been?”

“He prefers up and coming,” Claus corrects. “Just…not much on the up, as it goes.”

Lars’s car is parked up on the kerb. There are no scruff marks on the pavement, no sign of a struggle, no broken glass or clothing ripped in the guitar. These killers were too clean, knew the game too well. That’s what happened when hunters became the hunted.

“How about that grizzly bear?”

“It was…well, it was kind of sedated. But he still wrestled it!”

“Right.”

A pale scuttle of red veins the wall, mingling with brick dust.

Impaled through the satellite dish is a body, torso hanging meat confetti in red, blue and pink. A seagull, black beaked, pecks at the shining tentacles of skin.

An unholy gurgling erupts from Claus, and there is the skid of his sneakers as he lunges behind the bins.

Blake observes it bleakly.

 “That…” He spits on his sunglasses, buffers them with his sleeve. The sun is baking, and already there are flies. “…is one fucked up piñata.”

.

.

Night tickles Sam’s nose. The weight of Alan lifts off the mattress, jingling the springs and Sam cracks an eye open.

Alan stands with his back to him. Bare chested, tall, like the rise of a church spire, black jeans tight around tapered hips. He stretches, muscles pulsing and pulling in his back, and always, such a filthy boy, lights his evening cigarette.

Sam loves watching this well-rehearsed ritual, the snatch of light and the billows of smoke from that lax, lazy jaw. He has his own sort of beauty, a ripe masculinity, a blood sucking Marlon Brando from _A Streetcar Named Desire._

“Edgar been down yet?” Alan slides his lighter into his back pocket, impervious to Sam’s mental poetry.

“No.” Sam sighs. “Is he punishing us, do you think?”        

Alan does not respond. He dresses, white tank and leather coat, dog tags around his neck. His hair is growing long again, dark and difficult.

Poor Edgar. If he strikes too close to the kettle, he runs back to Twinkle and hibernates in her boudoir, as if she wears humanity on her hips just as much as hippy skirts. It’s infrequent now, but that’s no comfort to Alan. He’ll take his frustration out on a curly haired bystander, you just wait and see.

Sam rubs Nanook’s ears, and slides out of bed. Alan opens his _Car and Driver_ magazine, in a display of patience for Sam’s lengthy beauty routine. Sam flashes a winning smile and vanishes into his private bathroom. The sun isn’t down yet, not fully.

When they finally emerge, Twinkle is waiting upstairs, sat on the stage amongst remains of scenery and costume. Dust tugs on her skirt; she lifts a wrist and jangles her bracelets, and he chases the bells, soft nips on the ends of her fingers. Her lips curve, so sad and sweet, and she is like a renaissance painting, is Twinkle. A Lady of Shalott in dusty lace and melancholy bohemia.

Alan approaches. Dust growls.

Twinkle remains sitting, spreads her fingers out on her skirt, even as Alan looms. She says nothing, and does not look at him. Sam can sense the weight of her apprehension, however. Star isn’t stupid, and it isn’t like Alan is the pettiest son of a bitch on the planet.

Sam pulls a face and digs into his pockets.

“Where’s Edgar?” Alan never speaks to Star, if he can help it. He _demands_ of Star, and now, poor Twinkle, who’s offended him in the basest way possible for the older Frog Brother. The appropriation of Edgar, if only for eight hours.

“In _my_ room.”

It’s a passive ferocity, and one that is purely Star.

The leather of Alan’s jacket _creaks_ as he leans into Star, hands spread on either side of her. Dust bears his teeth. Nanook whimpers, unsure.

“Why?”

It’s a warning.

Star looks at him. Her eyelashes twitch, her throat contracting with her swallow.

“It’s not your business.”

Wow.

Go, Twinkle.

“That’s now what I asked.” Alan pushes in further. Sam wets his lip, observes the back of his nails, rocks back on his feet. Nanook wags his tail, nervous.

“I think…” Star sounds unusually strong. Quiet, but tense, controlled. She stares Alan right in the face. “…he didn’t want to be fucked by his brother today.”

Alan slithers back. The silence suffocates.

Alan _moves_ , but Sam’s hand is firm on his shoulder, claws tight in the leather. Edgar stands in the doorway. He’d heard everything. He shoots Star a grim look, who turns her face away. Alan snorts, giving Sam a shove (which he feels right to his bones. Always so rough, is Alan.)

“Hey…” Time to Sammy to take a stand. If anything, this does make him look like the most appealing prospect, at least for now. “You okay, Rambo?”

He smooths out Edgar’s hair, massages his shoulders, and speaks deftly, comforting. Alan glowers from the corner.

Edgar doesn’t push Sam away. But he’s not letting Sam read his thoughts, and Sam smiles, tight and a touch bitter. That’s just not polite. Alan snorts again.

“We need to get out. The nights not getting any younger.” Edgar’s got his Head Frog voice on, and that’s all well and dandy, but he’s the reason everyone is playing death glare charades. “We’ve got a pack feed tonight. Move out.”

“Oh, great!” Sam rubs his hands together. “Nothing quite like trust building exercises to enrich the blood bonds!”

Alan pinches him, hard, on the way out.


	3. Total Eclipse Of The Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A group feed, a few old faces, and Star gets the feeling she is being followed.

People don’t fit neatly in boxes, Star tells herself, as the three men clear the streets in front of her. Alan, for instance. Brother, monster, molester. Protector, her blood whispers, and Star ignores it. They’re all so fluid, the lot of them, so many angles and edges and shades of grey, all swept along by their desire.

She watches Sam mutely. She’d known about his crush on Edgar when he was a teen. They all did and thought it was cute. Sylvester Stallone posters began to replace the conventional Rob Lowe, and he stayed so long at the comic store Lucy would eventually ring in worry. Star hadn’t guessed that Edgar felt the same, or at least, was eventually convinced to. Not in the days when she’d woken with blood on her neck, groggy with death and Edgar carrying her like she was air, 70s newspaper and cannabis and embryonic fluid welcoming her into her new life. She’d fought and wept and screamed until she was raw and weak, and Edgar had bled her and fed her in that same room, until she was boneless, blank, and unable to feel betrayed even as Sam kissed Edgar in comfort. Ungrateful Twinkle, always so ungrateful! Don’t worry, she’ll come round eventually! And she did, didn’t she?

Star knew so little about Edgar. She knew how he thought, how he felt, but not how he processed or loved, it seemed. He could love openly now, pursue what he denied or could not define to himself. Sam, Alan, her.

Star wants to kill tonight. She’s hungry. She’s sick of being curtailed at every turn. Her mouth throbs and she bites her thumb, drawing hard on the bone. She eyes Alan, revulsion flip flopping her stomach. Who or what is another thing entirely. Edgar keeps his distance from her, walks in time with his brother. They’re joking with each other, heads close together, desires matched but different.

Edgar’s message could not be more obvious. Star wraps her scarf tight around her throat, pulling at the ends. Her eyes are red, but not from bloodlust. Sam watches her, silent. Sunny teenagers and beret wearing military wannabes squash and blur. She’s a freak, they’re all freaks, and this is one big _freakshow_ that not even David could dream of.

She’s hungry. Sam is smiling.

.

.

A group feed. Alan would approve this, but after the slut’s intervention, he isn’t quite in the mood. Edgar appeases, however, sturdy and practical.

He reasons, quietly, and not exactly compassionately, that a group feed would rein in Star’s wandering tendencies. She’s taken to leaving early, braving mid-afternoon sun, and for what?

Alan stops, Edgar in perfect tandem with him. Sam makes a grand show of grinding to a halt.

“You.” He points at Star. She pauses, obedient in all but the fire in her limbs. Her thirst is showing tonight. Good. “Find us some _things_ to eat.”

“As you wish, master.” She deadpans, and Sam snorts. Edgar hides a smirk. Alan watches her. This is the time to earn his forgiveness.

She winds her scarf loosely around her shoulders in a way that she knows is alluring, and moves off to mingle about the mortals. Her hunger makes her shimmer among them, visible only to their eyes. Edgar is suddenly still, having just discovered the full reasoning behind Alan’s orders, and he makes as if to follow her, but Alan grips his canvas jacket and reels him back, beside him.

“She has to earn her keep.” Alan says. This merits no discussion. Edgar glances at him sideways, jaw tight.

“Twinkle is good at that.” Sam affirms. “How else did she get my brother going?”

.

.

Star isn’t feeling cordial tonight, but the break of Alan’s words – it takes a strength she can’t summon to disobey her blood sire – swell her hunger out among the crowds, like a perfume to the unsuspecting.

She is ungentle tonight. She wants the hunter here to consume slowly. It would be her turn to drain and corrupt, at least for this evening, at least for an hour.

“Hey, are you lost?”

Oh. That didn’t take long.

A group of five men, led by a tanned surfer with a charm that could match Sam’s. They mill around her, fun and a little threatening. But she smiles anyway.

 “In a way.” Star speaks easy. She doesn’t look at their faces, doesn’t read their blood for backgrounds or religions or family. It’s easier not to. She can forget what she’s doing. “My friends and I were looking for a good club or bar or something. We’re new to San Cazador.”

“You want some recs?” The surfer leans in, giving her an undisguised once over. Star loosens her shawl, dropping it further down her shoulders. The numbness from her rage is dying. Guilt, hunger, lust plays her like a fool but it’s too late now, for Sam is approaching as second wind, looking every bit as seductive as her bare collarbone.

“Or you could show me.” She whispers, like it’s a secret between them, and his eyebrows raise, impressed. Got him.

.

.

Twinkle has a gift. Ten minutes and she’s already leading a pack of fine looking surfers like ripped lambs to slaughter. Say what you will about halfies, but Star could be damn useful when she put her mind to it.

“There we go.” Edgar grumbles, already wearing murder at the way the lead dude is appraising Twinkle’s backside. Alan, approving, flicks away his cigarette. He props himself tall, near human grin worked into place. Alan can act human. He was good at that even before he became a vampire.

Edgar puts his hands in his pockets, leans on one leg, depressingly casual. As a vamp, Edgar looks more approachable then he did as a man. Not cuter, though. That would have been impossible.

 Sam lets Alan coolly introduce the group. The men seem disappointed by Twinkle as the only female, but Sam slips in, whittles away doubt with jokes and charm, and soon masculine laughter is thrown back and forth as easy as a softball.

Star hangs back as they walk, just out of the town, to a bar that overlooks the sea. Sam stays behind, if only to smile.

“Good work, Twinkle.”

“Thanks.” She says dully.

“Oh, and by the way…” Sam catches her arm. He highlights the clear danger by letting his smirk drop. “What you did back there? Less a Twinkle, more a supernova. What the hell were you thinking, taking to Alan like that?”

Star sneers.

“Have you seen the way he talks to me, Sam?”

“He’s the Head Vampire, Twinkle. He can talk to us how he likes.”

Star is fidgety. He can feel the muscles twisting in her arms, see the ache and bulge of her gums. Oh, Twinkle…

“Don’t worry, love.” He touches her hairline, as if pushing away her curls, but he is discreet in how he soothes her mind, calms the crackle and bang in her brain to cinders. “You’ll be fine. You’ve gotten us some dinner. He’ll forget.”

There is no resistance. Star drowsily smiles at him, no longer a frightened rabbit.  She’s getting better; Edgar should be proud.

.

.

.

The last hour has passed according to plan, or whatever plan Alan has by allowing them to enter this seedy bar with the moth eaten booths. Star sits and watches from a stool at the empty bar, alcohol unpicking the men bit by bit, until they laugh and weaken and loosen their tongues. The surfer has kept stealing glances at her, kept trying to smile and beckon her over. It had gotten to the point where one of the young men, Shaun, finally abandoned the others to balance beside her on the stools and try to get her to talk.

She wish he wouldn’t, but he does, and she hadn’t even wanted to know the _names_ of these men, her coven's blood bag horderves, but Shaun was training to be a counselor, he liked caramel salted ice-cream, his mother was a teacher of the deaf and he had a sister in Canada. He tries to get her to speak, tries to softly wrestle words from her, the sweetest of social leeches. Star doesn't know why, why of all the people – charming Sam, be damned – he has chosen to sit apart from his friends to make conversation with her.

Shaun speaks as if he runs miles for words, and Star sees the pump of blood beneath his rich black skin, and her fingers twitch to touch him as much as her ears yearn to listen to him. The other men around Sam and Alan are growing rowdier by the minute, veins jostled by intoxication.

There were five men. One extra.

His eyes are big, pitted in the middle, like Zoe’s.

_Fuck._

Star stares at him. She has no such power to affect minds, but she tries. Her head throbs and her humanity shrieks, but she manages it, just so little, she manages….

“Hey.” Shaun checks his phone. “Ah, damn. I…I think I forget something at the motel.”

“You did?” Star says, head like a construction site. “Really? You should go and get it.”

“I…yeah.” He rubs his forehead, looking a little ill. It’s a small price for what he is about to miss out on, but Star feels worse for wear. He hadn’t laughed at her name. Even Michael had poked fun. “I…suppose I’ll meet you here later?”

“Of course!” Star beams. Shaun looks impressed, thinks he’s pulled (and under different circumstances and a different life, he would have done) slips his phone in his pocket and is gone through the door.

As soon as he is ten paces, Sam’s fail-safe will kick in. He will forget where he was, where he has been, and their faces will be no better than dreams. Shaun will return to his motel, await the friends that will never appear, and feel that familiar shock of grief at seeing their faces on ink and paper.

Star has done her good deed. She can’t worry about it. She turns, slowly, back to the men in the corner of the room.

The muscle head, Markus, jumps and shrieks, tripping over his trainers. Sam looks up, innocently confused.

“Are you ok, bud?”

“A rat…!” Markus kicks away at nothing, before swallowing, and sitting down. “There was a rat, I swear to god, a rat in my…”

The bar is empty. Alan’s cold stares have driven everyone out. Star looks up, grimly sees the black stains of dead bugs in the long plastic tubing, their gristle illuminated by the neon stutter of light. How many were dead in there, seduced by the cheap promise of artificial sun?

A sound of a struggle. Star nestles further into her shawl, perched on the bar stool. Markus’s thick, stupid face was currently being held in Alan’s hands, the thumbs of the vampire pressing deep into his cheeks. A snap, and Markus’s jaw dislocates just before he can scream, for Star is sure he sees rats pop from Alan’s eye sockets, break open his jaw, hordes of fat hairy bodies, dropping to the floor and scurrying up his khakis, over and into his skin.

Alan drops Markus, who kicks away on the floor, eyes bulging, spittle and blood congealing in his mouth. He scratches at his clothes, his skin, forcing through his wrecked teeth the scream of _“They’re all over me! In me! They’re in me!”_

“Jesus…!” The three remaining men jump up, plastic chairs a screech on the tiles. Mitch, Scott, Charlie – Star reads their names in her head, lining them all up like dominoes. Scott, the law student. Charlie, the wannabe celebrity blogger. Mitch, the good looking surfer who’d caught her eye across the crowd. “What the fuck did you do to him?”

“Oh geez, guys…” Sam slaps his knees in good humour. “I dunno what’s made your friend all freaky, but I can assure you, you shouldn’t be worrying about what is gonna happen to him. You should be wondering about what the fuck we’re gonna do to you, boys.”

And Alan tips up his cowboy hat, and all attempt at social humanity is gone. Sam leans affectionately on Alan’s shoulder, his spare hand clicking on the jukebox. Sam smiles and it is the same as always, save for the ripple across his brow and the incisors tipping over his pretty, pert mouth. Alan looks particularly horrid, so at ease.

Edgar, still visibly human, leans back against the door, the only exit.

Gunshots. Three in total. Straight into Alan’s gut, blooming black roses on his white singlet. Edgar’s growl is god damn primal and Alan looks up, past Scott and the smoking gun, and nods comfortingly at his brother.

“It’s alright, Edgar,” He says, in a voice Star has never heard before. “I’ll take care of this one.”

“What…” Scott tries again. The gun clicks, useless. Sam whistles a sorry tune. “What the fuck are you?”

“Nosferatu,” pipes up Edgar, deadpan. “Princes of darkness.”

“Nightcrawler.” Alan smiles his dreadful smile and takes a step toward Scott. “Bloodsucker.”

“El Vampiro,” chirps Sam, turning up the jukebox, much to Edgar and Alan’s signature groan. _All She Wants Is_ by Duran Duran blasts loud, deafening.

Sam leaps on the table, lynx like, rising slow, licking his lips, rubies in place of baby blues. Scott gapes at him. He’s done the worst thing imaginable; he’s taken his attention away from Alan.

Alan discards his jacket. Pale, muscled arms, lashed with thirsty veins, which pump and pulse as he tears Scott’s neck to the side, plunging in teeth, the sick _pop_ of skin making Star shudder. She sits, her knees tucked under her chin, and god knows why she is sat here, with them, watching this. It is both a punishment and honour. But she can’t see Scott, only his blood, ripe on Alan’s claws, who licks them clean, nodding in Sam’s direction. Alan smirks, still holding the twitching body, and flings himself back into the booth, sipping Scott like a martini.

Sam clicks his fingers, moon walking to Duran Duran, mouthing _what do you care, what do you dare._ He casually dances his way towards Charlie, who stumbles back, looking between Sam and the guarded door. Edgar braces his foot against it and raises an eyebrow in challenge.

“This is a classic, this,” Sam claps his hands, does a perfect light footed spin, stopping right in front of Charlie. “You want to dance with me, Charles?”

Charlie gasps in response, wilting. Sam softly cups the back of his neck, pulling him close. Charlie barely has time to sob before Sam spins him, dipping him in a mock tango, before he eats into Charlie’s chest, just over the heart, dragging teeth down the prone, begging body. The instrumental swells. The body is dropped, disemboweled, on the tiles.

Markus has just stopped short of the base of Star’s stool, hands reaching up to grasp helplessly at her skirt. His face is bloated and twisted and his eyes beg her for mercy. Blood and vulnerability tempt her like the tide. A shadow falls over them both.

Edgar has stepped up, just behind the sobbing shape of Markus on the floor. He frowns, places his boot on the back of Markus’s neck, and presses down. A _crack._ Edgar hurls up the huge body and turns from Star. Alan and Sam see his face change as he feeds. Not her.

Mitch has backed himself into a corner, babbling incoherently. Star slips serenely from her seat. She hooks her thumbs into her hip bones, and walks, slowly, softly, to the corner where Mitch trembles. The Duran Duran song has finished. Instead, Bonnie Tyler’s _Total Eclipse of The Heart_ begins to play, piano notes a mournful tremble in the air. Star’s skirt wafts with her movement, making her float, ethereal, to where Mitch cowers. Up close, she can appreciate his honey hair, his washed out hazel eyes, even if they brim of tears, even if he smells of sweat and urine. He looks, fleetingly, like Michael, and her gums itch.

She can sense how immobile Edgar is, and the smirks and shrugs shared by Sam and Alan.

Star places her hand on his shoulder, another on his back. He starts to cry like a child. She begins to sway him, to the dilatory rhythm of the music, stroking his face, his lips, his throat. She kisses his cheek, the space between his ear and neck, and her teeth latch onto the skin there, a squeeze of flesh, and –

She hadn’t meant to bite. She hadn’t. It was a tease, a taste, a take that.

But his pulse fills her mouth and she gags, gasps, shoulders hunching up. But he sighs, submits, or is he struggling? She can’t tell. But this – this is heaven. This is water in a desert. This is – life. Rich, nourishing – every cell in her body tingles, a burn that runs between her legs and up again. She –

Edgar is too strong to fight off, but she doesn’t resist. She falls back, drunk, horny, and very ashamed. She gasps, sucking the blood of her fingers, daring to lean back, to kiss Edgar, who dodges it just in time. He glowers down at her, furious and terrified, hands firm on her shoulders.

Mitch is still alive. She smells him. He hits the bar, slides down, looking at the blood on his palms, groping at his neck as if trying to put it back in.

Sam is laughing. He’s laughing hard, and Alan, cigarette lit, has joined him with his rotten masculine chuckle. Edgar looks back at them, anger softening from his face, before he sighs and lies Star down in one of the booths. Star rubs her fangs with her thumbs, pressuring painful pleasure from the root of her teeth, hating herself yet _thrilled._

The three men circle Mitch. They mock as they take him apart, and Star knows it is slow, for the screaming seems to last an eternity. She’s horrified at herself, blissed out on fresh human blood, watching the moonlight streak across the ceiling.

Warmth and belonging runs through her veins. She is sated.

_Manipulated,_ she warns herself.

Sam, bloodied, hops into view.

“Nice going, Twinkle!” _He’s so handsome and youthful,_ Star thinks giddily. _He eats people to stay that way._ Sam’s smile stretches at her thoughts. “Why yes, Twinkle. An iron rich diet and plenty of beauty rest, that’s my secret.”

“Is she okay?” Edgar appears, hovering over her like a strange angel. Carefully, he tilts her chin. Star’s eyes are glazed, her mouth open. “I think it might have worked too well.”

“You should let her feed, Edgar. She’ll be more useful fully invested.”

Alan’s voice, faraway. More engaged. He must be feeling better. Is this all she is to exist for, now? She groans, not caring, reaching for Edgar, and slipping hands under his shirt.

“Not here, Twinkles,” Sam slaps her hand, as if she’s a naughty child. “First blood can do that to you, Star. You’re gonna feel on Cloud 9 in more ways than one.”

Edgar flushes and demurely pushes her hands back. But the troubled look on his face is gone. He looks approving, at peace, and nods at his brother and boyfriend.

“I think it worked.” Head Frog voice, perfected. He tries to bat Sam away, only to start at Alan’s easy grip around his waist. “Good work.”

“It was satisfying.” Alan nuzzles into Edgar, Sam spitefully pinching him when Edgar isn’t looking. “I’m ready for some fun now.”

“Recreational activity!” Sam claps. “Exciting! I’m thinking, the movies? The casino?”

“Ugh…” Star pushes herself up, shaking her cobweb of hair from her sight. “Is there such a thing as a blood hangover?”

Her only reply is a parade of three fanged smiles.

_Once upon a time there was light in my life_  
_But now there's only love in the dark_  
_Nothing I can say_  
_A total eclipse of the heart_

.

.

.

David had been to San Cazador once before, in the 1920s, trailing Max on a business trip. A seedy docks surrounded by high grassy cliffs, scenes standard from any black and white photograph in retrograde community museums. Fishermen mending their nets on the dock, workers in weather beaten suits sat in droves waiting for the next job, women with babies on their backs. David had been wearing a suit, had looked dapper and above it all, even if he had crawled from the same salt as these people, when his blood had been warm (and his own.)

He’d looked out at the workers with backs broken by thirty and thanked the fact that would never be him.

They’d been invited to stay in the local seaside hotel, which Max called “quaint” and David had called ugly. Max ate the woman who owned it, a wealthy widower with a bonnet. David had fed on her handsome son, who fought him with a clothes rail, banging his crucifix on David’s back as David had drained him. He’d gone to bed with him the night before. Between the killing and the sex, David had found no difference. He kept the crucifix and dangled it on an earring that had swung from his ear during the 70s.

Michael has never been to San Cazador. There were so many places Michael had not been, even with the two decades that now spanned their love affair, they still had far to go. David still had so much to show Michael. Michael, who’d been the essential eighties horror movie hero, fighting back against corruption until he’d found the taste of it too addictive, too magical on the tongue, to live without.

And who was to say it was corruption? Everyone dies, and lives in denial of that fact. They just decide the place and time for a few.

David had bided his time, and Michael had not disappointed.

Michael did not disappoint now, leaned back against his bike, still wearing the chapped leather jacket from the shitty Santa Carla stalls, still with Star’s discarded earring wobbling from his earlobe. It must have been such a romantic gesture at the time. A mismatched summer romance, poignant in photo albums. Now, the summer sung in them forever, Michael and him, immortal playtime.

“David.” Michael leans over his handle bars. He doesn’t accept David’s cigarette. The clean living work out freak is yet to work _out_ of his system. “You think Sammy is here?”

 “I did promise.” He flicks away his cigarette, grinding it under his boot. “I know Alan’s coven has been here for half a decade, although I hear the elder Frog has had a bad case of the dancing feet since he kicked off his own sire.”

Michael’s brow creases.

“He killed his own sire?”

“Drained her to her bones. Why he travels all the time. Finds a powerful mark, saps their strength. Moves on when he’s bored.”

Michael, agitated, looks out across the city below the hills.

“Is Sammy safe with a guy like that?”

David smirks.

“I think you’ll find “Sammy” is more vicious then you, Michael.”

It had been Sam and Alan, not just Alan, who’d certified this coven’s notoriety. And typical Michael, acting if Sam is still covered in comics and wearing his mother’s curtains.

“Does he know we’re coming?”

David swings his leg over his motorbike, beckoning at Michael to do the same. The rush of their engines serenade the town below, holding the promise of blood.

“I’ll send the word out.” David revs his bike. Michael is the first to move out, bumping over the tracks to the streets below. Through the shade of the trees, David spies the twinkle of his victim’s crucifix, sewn into Michael’s jacket. He’d given it to him after Michael had made his first kill.

.

.

.

Michael is coming. Star senses it, but only because she has what neither Sam, Alan or Edgar share. She once had David’s blood operating her veins, and although Alan’s blood blots out Max’s past effect, she still feels that pull to her old sire, like the stale pang of a scar.

The group feed has left her careless, made everything dizzy and sweetened. She knows, deep down, that the euphoria will die, leaving her once again to her half human self, upon which to mull and sob and strike out, alone in the dark. She had almost made her first kill. No, she _would_ have done if Edgar hadn’t stopped her at the last second, ever the devoted paragon, even if he’d sucked off the boy’s bones only moments later.

But now, Star gives in. The Frog Brothers mill in front, voices high and content. Sam kicks along the seawall, dancing ahead, to the music that booms from the local clubs, and grabs her hand and pulls her on, spinning her and she laughs, slipping in her sandals. It’s one in the morning. The world is alive. Star, forgetting about blood and Michael, chases Sam down to the surf. Away from everyone else, discreet, they lift off into the air, and Star is scatty and sleepy and not used to flight, and Sam helps her down, an arm around her waist.

“Michael’s coming,” She says, half breathless, by his ear. She’s too drunk to be resentful. “He’s coming to see you.”

“Mike?” Sam brightens like a little boy. “Holy shit, Twinkle. _Really?”_

Star nods.

“Old blood never lies.”

“Goddamn it!” Sam spins her again, before blasting off in the direction of Edgar, who barely has time to finish his beer before he is collided by an excited Sam.

Star shakes the sand off her skirt. She is aware, like a blister on her foot, of Alan hovering nearby, a sour approval on his face.

“As of now, you are forgiven.” He lights a cigarette, illuminating the flecks of blood crusted around his large, languid mouth. Star imagines finding all his filthy packets and throwing them into the ocean. “But do not repeat your previous disrespect. Or else there will be repercussions.”

Star looks at him. She is connected to him through Edgar, only under his thrall because of their shared sickness. Love for Edgar, and blood. The wind off the sea breaks the sand against his oil slicked boots.

The blood has made her body obedient, but not her tongue.

“Do you love your brother?” She asks, finally. There is a silence growing in the pit beneath them, a space between a monster and a weak willed half killer. But he has fed, and he has Edgar, and so he is in the mood for indulgence.

“Yes.” He blows smoke in her direction. She scents the nicotine, the sweat of Sam, the struggle of Edgar. She represses a growl that rumbles hungry and awful in her belly. He shows his teeth. “In all the wrong ways, sorry to say.”

“If you love him so much…” Tears flicker her sight. “Why did you do this to him?”

He pauses, as if genuinely contemplating the weight of her question. He smokes until the cigarette is a stub between his fingers, and he drops it on top of the crushed remains of a child’s sandcastle.

“Because he wanted it. He didn’t want to say it out loud, and he wanted to do the right thing, but he wanted it regardless, no matter what morality or society said. He wanted me. Maybe not in the way I wanted, but – he still _needed me_. More than anything. More than his mission, more than Sam, more than you. If you’d seen the _desperation_ in his dreams…”

Star trembles. She had. She’d been there, in the trailer, when he’d woke sick and shaking. Surely, because it was the nightmares. Because he was afraid of being caught. Not because he was afraid – of what he really wanted, no…

Alan, who never talks, can’t stop now, if only to see the hollowing in her face.  “He was sick of being alone. I granted his wish. And Sam too. He wanted him, and Edgar wanted back, and …” He gestures lazily. “We all wanted what we weren’t supposed to have. But we got it.” He moves past her like a shadow, like a bad dream. “And we’re better for it.”

“I don’t believe you,” Star says, simply.

“Then riddle me this, Star,” She hates the sound of her name on his cold, marble voice. “If he loved you so much, then why did he do _this_ to you?”

And like that, he’s gone.

Star stands on the beach. The gales pick up and slap the tears from her eyes. The crunch of Alan’s shoes fade; she feels a pull, like a yank of a leash, and Sam swears at Alan to _cut it out_ , he’s coming for god’s sake. Star meekly follows, up back onto the main drag, Alan’s broad back a reaper in her sight.

Edgar’s hand finds her shoulder, the same place and grip as the first time they made contact, up in the Emerson’s bedrooms, and his fingers had flexed, crushing around the back of her neck and he’d spat that they were demons, that they should be terminated, _right now –_

 “You helped feed the family, Star.” He pulls her into a rare hug. He nods, ever so proud and stoic. “You proved yourself.”

Star looks up at him. Put him under any kind of mood lighting, and Edgar could look so innocent, just like a fifteen year old, every bit as gung-ho and careless in his kills of vampires as his now human victims. She looks at him and thinks of Alan’s words, at the ease in his bones, even with the wrath of Alan’s love. She leans her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes.

Sam is bugging Alan, craning up to him. Alan lowers his head and kisses him roughly, before pushing him away, and Sam smirks and twirls Alan’s cigarette between his forefinger and thumb.

They start to head for home, Star wishing for Dust in her arms and her honey lit sanctuary, even if human blood rushes through her and makes everything seem crisp and lusty and _unnatural._

They come to the road that leads to their theatre, and Star feels a crackle in the air, a nip to the back of her neck. She turns away from her companions and looks toward the hillside hidden behind the trees.

Atop the hill, she sees an enormous dog silhouetted against the mound of the moon.  Silver glistens on the heavy lope of its back, fur black and scruffy on its haunches, the domed head hanging low and watchful. Its eyes nestle like sequins within the broad face thinning out into a thin, fanged snout.

The others enter the theatre, ignorant of its presence. Their voices fall away, and Star just stands, staring down the wolf, and it is as if a fine fishing line exists between Star’s gaze and the flawed amber of the creature’s eyes, and Star can smell it, the loamy air, salt sweat fur and damp grass.

A flurry of fur and legs, and Dust is greeting her, snaking around her skirt, and as Star bends to pet him, the wolf is already gone.

.

.

.

The sun is on the horizon now, blurring that line between night and day. When Alan was new, he would stand outside as long as he could bear, if only to be in the same light as Edgar, even if his skin had smoked before he’d retreated. Those early, ravening years. The burning years, he’d dubbed them.

Edgar is behind him, close. A stern fretfulness, for Alan is out in the light, and god, he forgot how his brother could _worry._

“Come inside,” He gruffly says. He crosses his arms. No place for discussion. “You’re gonna be beef jerky and I’m going to be peeling your ass off the pavement.”

“Just testing my resolve.”

“Well, you’re not fuckin’ testing mine.” He points to the door. “In.”

“Hm.”

The sun creeps further in, and Edgar, soft boned younger brother, grips the back of his jacket and drags him in, just as the light spoils on Alan’s boots.

Alan shrugs off Edgar in the safe dusty dark, staring mournfully at his hand.

“I dropped my cigarette, Edgar.”

“You would have lit up like one, if you’d stayed out there any longer.”

“Hah.”

“Why did you even take it up?” Edgar only touches him in that rowdy, brother of mine kind of way. It’s enough, Alan thinks, but not quite. “Whenever I look at you, you’ve got one glowing.”

“Can’t kill me.”

Edgar looks at him. He smirks, slapping his hand, hard, on Alan’s chest. Alan slowly looks down, trailing his gaze from Edgar’s fingers to Edgar’s arm to Edgar’s face, and mirth fades in Edgar’s eyes, as if he’s forgotten what he was going to say.

Those _burning_ years. That loneliness, razors and pins, in gut, heart and head. He’d bitten Edgar. No, _dove_ into Edgar, and drowned each other in their shared blood. They made their mark on each other.

And now, Edgar here, with his hand on Alan’s heart, and the silence between them.

Edgar huffs, as if it’s nothing, but he jumps, for Alan’ s hand has settled over his, dry and cool palm pressed to the once wood chewed knuckles of his only brother.

“I could have killed you, once,” Edgar murmurs, low and slight.

“I would have let you, once.”

“But I didn’t.” The heat of their hands, combined. No heartbeat between them, not even a borrowed one. “I didn’t.”

“Do you regret it?” It’s the first time Alan has asked. He never did before, when he’d expected rage and rebellion, he’d instead received grief and surrender. He wanted the years to broaden his brother’s anger, experiences, to see how wonderful it could be. Sam helped, Star hindered.

“I wouldn’t be here if I did,” Edgar finally says. He pauses, removes his hand. “Don’t go outside anymore, ok? I may be immortal, but I don’t want the immortal stress of you being an idiot.”

Alan laughs.

“Yet you’re with Sam.”

“Fuck you, bro.”

“You sure?”

Edgar scowls, shoves him back, reaching up to knock his hat, and Alan vamps, and Edgar barely reacts, just pulls a face, and throws his hat down the stairs, which is then followed by the brothers, wrestling and spitting and laughing, and Sam complains from downstairs that _are you having fun without me_ and _don’t make me jealous you pricks_ and _is it that fucking hat again I swear to god -_

Something’s do not change. The mind link – the shared feeding has made Edgar easy, relaxed, more his old self – blooms a brief, dreamy delight of past lives. Gold spilling through racked comics, struggling with cardboard boxes, upstairs in dark bedrooms and dim flash lights, reading aloud to the other, Edgar demanding Alan to recite _Vampires Everywhere_ , their personal doctrine that became reality too quickly and then their only and eternal reality, and of course, Sam –

The brightness fades to only Edgar’s face, who is no longer smiling, but his eyes are scorching and searching his brother’s face. He’s closed into himself again, shadow pulling at his brow, but Alan can feel him in his arms, the play fighting affirming Alan’s _unnaturalness_ and Edgar’s tender, frightened tolerance.

It was always this way. Alan is Alan, and Edgar is Edgar, and whatever they were to each other, they still are.


	4. a powder keg combination

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edgar unravels further. Star gets dressed and gets out. Claus does some advertising for Sony.

Zoe knew what the girl was. Of course she did, with her wolf nose. She could sniff out a needle in a haystack, and boy could she could smell it the first time a distracted Star had come into the shop. Hunger and half death, a ride of decay and musk and a quasi-sweetness, on her wolf nose. Usually, those things died in a week, to full fang and smelling only of dead things, but there was a stagnancy to Star's smell, like dust that had sat too long.

Zoe was all too familiar with the bundle of humans that passed through her door, and she greeted them all with her fangs tucked safely behind her tongue, but when that woman had drifted in, thirst aggressive and her attention firmly on Zoe, the bookkeeper wondered whether this girl had been stupid enough to mark her as a victim.

But Star hadn't. She’d studied the long lines of bookshelves, and Zoe had pretended to not notice how the woman looked at her. It was an _attraction,_ one that Zoe felt as Star had shivered as their fingers had touched over a Harley Quinn comic. A half vampire and a werewolf, a powder keg combination, and Star wasn't as much looking for prey as for a friend.

Zoe was happy to have friends. Frank the owner was a cheapskate, happy to overprice their vintage stock and to cheat any sallow faced collector having to sell off their childhood collection. And Patrick, the guy who worked on weekends, who took too many smoke breaks and ending up reading all the new issues before they even got on the shelves. She had friends at her pottery classes, people who came by and chatted, the waitresses at the diner and the town drunk who fell asleep on the porch come Wednesday. But nobody to stay the night, nobody to get truly close to, nobody to understand _what_ and _who_ she was.

Zoe had spent her teens in hostels, when her transformations were hard to control, because her mother was no longer around and it turned out emotions and transfigurations were a bitch to divorce from each other. Now she was older, she had the weight of experience on her back, and she’d become far too comfortable with her human side. A spritely book geek, hiding her fur, her true skin turned inside out. File her nails, push her teeth in, lock the wolf within the woman. You’d think she was on the hunt, what will all the hiding she does.

San Cazador was a quiet place, a safe place, save the few vampires that passed through, but there were none like her. She‘d tried once to find others of her breed, but they all seemed lost to time and pain and hiding. Too much hiding can kill a wolf. She finds herself circling if she doesn’t transform enough, like an animal gone rabid.

But Zoe has damn good hearing, knows the backstreets and sand rock paths that act as pass ways for the creatures of the underworld, and she’s heard whispers of an _Alan_. It was a weirdly standard name for a master of darkness, or whatever the fuck he actually was, but there was now a jitter underneath San Cazador, threatening to rock into the day, and Zoe was actually _glad_ no one knew about her. But she wonders if Star, the lonely half vampire, is a member of their trope. If so, she has to be careful, but why keep around someone who refused to turn?

But now, it’s a fresh and cloudy evening, and she’s up on her stool, sorting Superman into chronological order. The bell goes, and she skips down, enjoying the spring of power in her calves.

Beanie hat, an armoured vest, and military boots in this weather. It’s the same guy who’d attempted to grab Star a few nights ago, the same guy who ended up with a stiletto in his eye.

And from the look of him, he knows that all too well.

“Look…” He takes off his beanie hat, as if that makes any difference. His companion, a large guy with eyes like saucers, looks around the shop as if he’s dreaming. “I know you know what she is, and I just need to ask a few questions…”

“No.” Zoe’s tone is the same she uses against shoplifting assholes. And hunters. She can sniff it a mile away. Oh, great. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you want to get served, or do you want to get thrown out? I can do both.”

“Does…” The hunter’s friend smells of blacking tape and photographic paper. He points at Zoe. “…she know about the…the things?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” She absently fiddles with the Batman on her lobe and thinks of Star, and the muted pain beneath the numbness, where the needle had found flesh and broken it. “And I don’t have time to deal with…” She spits out the last word for emphasis. “…perverts.”

The hunter goes red as a toy truck. All he needs is a cartoon whistle and he’d be a Looney Tunes character.

“I wasn’t…!” He swallows. “Look, we’re getting off the subject. I’m Blake. The lost lamb here is Claus.”

Claus waves, merry and more than a little hysterical.

Zoe perks up.

“Hi Claus.” She shakes his hand. “Do you like comics? We’ve got enough here to sink the Titanic. Anything from Batman to Sandman to Tank Girl.”

“I like Tank Girl.”

“We’re getting off the subject again.” Blake draws a breath. He’s going to try a different tactic, she can tell. “Look, the girl is in trouble, okay? She can still be saved.”

Claus looks confused. He has obviously heard something different.

Zoe thinks about it. But hunters are bad news, even the good intentioned ones, the ones who want to save sad eyed waifs that could flip out and rip a throat in a second. The thought makes Zoe squirm. No, Star – Star wasn’t like that. She’d been a half vampire for so long, and she hadn’t killed. So –

“I…” Her hesitance sparks triumph in Blake’s face. “I don’t know anything about that. If she wants to be saved, that’s her decision, right?”

“You would let a fellow human suffer?” Blake pushes, seeing an opening and going for it. Hm. Zoe wonders if he was a politician in a past life.

“I think you’re being over dramatic,” She snaps, turning away. Her lobe smarts, and subconsciously she checks the buzzing streets outside the Bookener. Zoe inhales, and no, there is not even a pinch of her in the air. Blake watches her too closely, suspicious. Claus is inching towards the Tank Girl Collector’s Edition in the window. “If I think she’s in danger, I’ll know who to call, okay?”

* * *

 

Star knows what is about to happen. The day is slowing to the early evening, the burn of low light framing the edges of her peach blinds, but she knows what is going to happen, because she cannot hear Sam’s booming music or smell the endless chains of Alan’s cigarettes. She knows what is going to happen because Dust is tossing in her sheets, fraying her blankets and shawls, shaking and yipping and scratching at the mattress, as if trying to bury himself inside it.

She has tried in vain to sleep, her stomach still obscenely full from the night before, a shameful weight in her belly that makes her sick. Usually, the daytime sleep is irresistible, an anchor that screams for rest, but somehow a pure strength of will has restrained it from her. She is part grateful, part horrified, for now the elder vampires are about to do something, and if it’s Sam and Edgar or Sam and Alan, she wouldn’t care for all the leaves on the trees, but it’s _not –_

_Get dressed,_ a voice in her head booms. _Get dressed and get out of there._

She has heard that voice before. Once at Santa Carla, urging her to run whilst her stomach griped and rolled and everything in the world appeared stark hungry red. The second, when Edgar vanished from the trailer nearly eleven years ago, and she’d fought the raw burn in her lungs, vomiting bile and blood, with only Laddie’s pale sticky hand for company.

She’d heard –

Her body screams for her to remain in bed, to lie there and lull and look at the ceiling, until the light was fully gone and the damage was done, and then she would have to look Alan in the eye, and –

No. Fuck that.

Star, as if in a dream, swings her legs around the side of the bed. She is still clad in her underwear from the previous night, where she’d stripped off her clothes and threw them at the end of the bed. She sees, with a visible shudder, that they are clotted with blood and sand. The skirt is worse than the tank top, which is frilled with the blood of the surfer, and she tastes him on the tip of her tongue, a shadow memory, and hates herself.

With a sneer, she kicks the clothes under the bed. She dons fresh underwear as Dust watches, crouched in the bedclothes like a child in a pillow fort, his tail twitching as she reaches for the suitcase splayed open on the floor. Sam has claimed all the wardrobes, so naturally, she makes do.

The blood link crackles in the air around her and she jumps, aware that far in the other room, the tension bound like a fat cloud summer storm is about to burst.

_Come on. Get dressed, get out._

Star doesn’t bother with her hair, nor with the cracked remains of her make-up, or even the new litany of jewellery left for her by Sam as a proud offering. She grabs an oversized t-shirt – why are all her tops white, white as driven snow? – and bundles out a beige lace skirt. It’s a tacky combination, but she doesn’t care. She picks opal earrings to dangle from her ears ( _bad luck, bad luck, bad luck_ ) and clunky wood bangles on her wrists to give the impression she is going for style. (The Batman stud is still there, and if she lies on her side, the butterfly pokes painfully into the back of her ear. Possibly symbolic.)

The air is getting hot. The monsoon is about to break. Star clips Dust on his lead, and she reaches for, and then reaches past, the marine coat with FROG brazen across the front. Star doesn’t want his name on her, not now.

_Not ever_ , whispers the insistent voice.

She wraps a loose knit shawl around her shoulders, and with Dust pulling and panting on the lead, flees as if the devil is after her.

 

* * *

 

 

_The family home, rotted._

It’s a stupid thought, but it comes to Edgar anyway. What was rotted about family? Home? He didn’t have a home. He had a comic shop and parents who slept all day and his brother. Yes, his brother was his home.

_Rotted. Gone._

He snarls, bored with his thoughts. Somewhere in his chest there’s a cracking, but he’s too distracted and too damn lazy to do anything about it.

Sam is lain under him, kissing his wrists, sneaking nips when he thinks Edgar isn’t noticing. The pain is secondary to Edgar; a frown line creeps into the shadow of his brow as he feels the presence of Star leave the building, yet _again._

Alan stands close to the canopy hanging loose and ragged over the bed, watching Edgar and Sam embrace. Despite the flowery decay of Sam around him, Edgar always knows that Alan brings Santa Carla memories of ink, crimped duct tape, cardboard and dust and drugs. _Rotting things?_ Maybe. Edgar stops, his fingers pressing tight into the skin of Sam’s back, and he looks over Sam’s shoulder at his brother, who drops his cigarette to the floor and crushes it beneath his boot. There is a visible satisfaction to the action, possibly at having been noticed, possibly because Sam is there and Alan once again has all the attention.

Edgar grins. His brother is such a big kid.

Sam mewls at being ignored, drawing a shimmer of blood on Edgar’s cheek with his nails, before he follow’s Edgar’s gaze, and smiles, and with a _tch_ of his tongue against his teeth lifts a finger and beckons to Alan.

Edgar rolls his eyes. Typical Sambo, so greedy. Shane’s jade pendant winks from beneath Sam’s open shirt.

The bed compresses with Alan’s weight; his knee, sunk into the springs. Goosebumps prickle Edgar’s skin, lining his neck to his back. He turns, frowning, as Sam twists and extends a hand to cup Alan’s face, to bring him in for a kiss. Alan takes it, but his eyes are open and are on Edgar. Edgar knows they share Sam, that’s usual, he’s not jealous or anything, he’s not weird like that. But Alan’s desire pulsates through Sam’s body, pushes like needles into Edgar’s skin through the avenue of Sam’s thighs, naked, on his lap. Sam undresses Alan – a sudden tear of Alan’s white singlet, a sudden brutality amongst Sam’s tender touches – and Alan finally slides his gaze down to Sam, spitefully disinterested. He smirks, part disgusted, part desperate.

The mind link burns between them, the _three_ of them, pulling at Edgar’s patience, making the room fuzzy, his throat tight. Sam is gone from his arms. The cracking in his chest widens, seeming almost audible.

Edgar reaches for Alan, his palm firm against his chest.

Alan pauses. His eyes – blank, distrustful, dark – are unnaturally wide. Edgar growls, yanks the white cotton aside, so Alan’s chest is exposed. Blood brothers – heart to heart, now and forever. He rumbles it, private, in the solitary space of their heads that only he and Alan occupy. Sam’s mouth downturns.

_The family home, rotted._

No, this is his family.

Edgar bites. It’s ferocious, caving open skin, splitting arteries, blood still warm from previous kills alive in his gullet. Edgar rocks Alan back, feeling a spur of giddy heat at Alan’s half broken gasp, and with palms firmed on Alan’s waist, he drinks.

If this is what Alan wants, fine. If this is what the family requires, _fine._

Before, it had been different. It had been  _Edgar_  - caving it at the touch, falling back, boneless, brotherhood forced back to something primal, warped - but now, Alan is back on the bed, hands slipping up to grip Edgar’s face, thumbs stroking the space between his ears and the meet of his jaw. Edgar looks up, his own hands spread on either side of Alan, blood dribbling off his chin. Sam, expressionless, sits on the armchair opposite the bed, filing his nails. He catches Edgar’s attention and offers a bitter half smirk.

It was just enough, to tip Edgar’s confidence, to bring reason and restraint and forbearance to the surface – 

_What the hell is he doing?_

Alan snarls, bringing up the monster, and Edgar barely sees Sam’s smile before he is sunk in the mattress. Alan bites Edgar’s neck, driving Edgar up who grips his brother’s neck and arm, sliding the sheets beneath his boots and hissing  _Alan for fuck’s_ sake and  _Alan._

Alan roughly palms him through his thick army slacks, Alan’s thumb pressing almost painfully into Edgar’s innermost thigh. Edgar presses his knee warningly into Alan’s stomach.

“Alan…” He wavers, shuddering at the breath on his neck and the pressure on his groin. He growls. _“Alan…”_

_“Ssshh.”_ Sam is there, as if by magic, soothing out Edgar’s hair, holding him down with his monster’s strength, still smiling that strange half smile. He leans on Alan, pushing him further into Edgar, who exclaims at the extra contact. Alan’s searching hand has popped open his buttons, and moved _inside_ his trousers. Skin makes contact with skin and Edgar panics, almost throwing the two off with the sudden launch of his hips.

“Edgar…” Alan finally speaks, rough and hot against his pulse. He slides his spare hand up to stroke Edgar’s cheek. “Relax.”

Edgar stirs, disturbed. His eyes flicker from Sam to Alan like a frightened rabbit, and Sam bends over Alan to muss Edgar’s hair, as if he was a kid.

“I know you don’t like it when I cloud your brain,” He says, none too comforting. “But I can do it again, if you like. Make you pliant.”

Edgar is not afraid of Sam. He has not been afraid of Sam since – since fucking forever – but Sam’s half smile is a _smirk_ , and a nasty one at that.

Sam slides out of view and Edgar is aware of his combats being stripped away from his legs, of Sam’s cool pampered hands feeling along his thighs, spreading them. Alan has stopped touching Edgar, instead slipping his hands up to Edgar’s bare chest, exploring the dips in his stomach and breast.

Somewhere along the line, something was taken as consent. Groggily, Edgar spies his neat bite on Alan’s shoulder.

_Was that -_

Sam sighs, oh so sweet, and there is the sound of something being squirted onto an open palm, and then –

A wet finger prods Edgar’s entrance, and he throws himself up with a shout.  Alan holds him fast.

“C’mon, bud.” Sam enters him with his fingers, snickering at the tremble in Edgar’s chin. “You usually like this when I do it.”

Alan chuckles, and Edgar sees from the corner of his eye the sharp scratch of his stubble netted across the skin of jaw, the tail flick of his mad, messy hair. He is holding Alan back, claws sunk into the flesh across his shoulders, and Sam giggles as Edgar hisses at him, as the fingers fork and curve and then -!

_“Fuck.”_ Edgar arches, involuntarily grinding against Alan. “Fuck – Alan, Sam – fuck, no more.”

“No more?” Sam’s smile creeps across his face. Alan has turned from Edgar finally, and is looking back at Sam, and Edgar can’t even imagine the look he’s giving him, if not for all the stars in his eyes. Sam pushes his fingers in further, pistoning  that one spot, again and again, and all Edgar can feel is a growing white fire in his belly, and it almost like Alan isn’t there, pushed down hard on him,  feeling the involuntary grind of his brother with each push of Sam’s clever fingers. He gasps, a break in his head, barely able to hear Sam’s words; “I’m knuckle deep in you now, Edgar. You want me to stop, hm?”

With a frisson of fear and arousal, he can hear that Sam has transformed.

“That’s enough.” Alan’s voice is hoarse, hoarser then Edgar has ever heard it, mutated with bloodlust and his own transformation, for Edgar can feel the ridges and teeth of Alan’s demon face on his shoulder. He rises, muscled arms bent on either side of Edgar’s head, and despite the red in his face and eyes, he is not amused. Edgar is breathing heavy, jawbone set, human face indignantly turned upwards towards Alan’s vamped one.

“Enough?” Sam whines, incredulous. “Playing the good cop, Alan? Finally, after all this?”

Alan sits back on his calves, pondering. Edgar’s gaze locks on the shredded white singlet, the red punctures of teeth that are beginning to bruise and already beginning to heal. Alan fingers each and every bite, and slowly, the little bit of conscience shadowing his face begins to fade.

_I’ve done something. I’ve bridged something._

He shrugs, backs up to the headboard.

“Bring him here.”

“What the fuck?” Edgar spits out, humiliation and more importantly, temper rising hot in his cheeks. Anger is good. He can control that. “Bring _him_ here? What the fuck am I, an _object_ you can just bag around?”

“That’s what Mom used to say,” Alan says, thoughtful.

Edgar tries to struggle upright, but Sam – goddamn Sam, who he used to be able to arm-wrestle to the ground with the barest effort – is there, flipping him on his stomach, yanking him up so he faces his brother.  Alan’s eyes travel languidly, _lovingly_ down Edgar and up again. The double pressure of Sam and Alan enter his mind in perfect sync, almost sending Edgar up off the fucking floor.

“Ah –ah!” Sam wraps his arms tight around Edgar, who feels a hard sob echo in his throat. “That’s bad form, bud. I’m not finished.”

Alan lights a cigarette.

“God forbid,” He says between exhales. “That you do not get to finish, spoilt brat.”

“Fuck off, Alan,” Sam yanks back Edgar’s hair, exposing Edgar’s neck. “I’m the one who’s currently got your brother, hm? Need no glamour to get him hard.”

Edgar would bite back at that – _need to work harder than that, mallrat_ – but Sam and Alan hear the echo of it and laugh, hard and long and hateful.

“Sorry bro,” Alan whispers, making the words stifling. He moves closer again, and Edgar is sure he is reflected in the widening whites of his eyes. “Wasn’t hard at all.”

Edgar realises there is a _reason_ that Sam is holding him so tight.

“Agh…Alan…” He tries to plea, tries to unroll the words from the toffee that is his tongue. (Sam’s influence, massaging his mind from the inside.) He grits his teeth. “Alan…please…”

Alan licks his thumb, and with a look fixated primarily on Edgar, runs it up the side of his straining length and back again.

“Hm….!” Edgar flinches. Sam shudders with delight, nosing the back of his hair. Edgar glowers, balls his fist and stares him down. Alan’s eyes light up, _adoring_.

Sam’s lips mime the word _creepy_ into Edgar’s hair.

Another lick, another finger. The ring finger this time, moving daintily from base to tip. Edgar twitches deep in his belly, a shiver that prickles his back to his hairline. His breathing rags, hitches, as Alan finally moves to his littlest finger, circling it slowly around the tip.

“Alan...” He croaks. The nearest to his sire he is, the more his blood crackles and flares, the more his arousal peaks and the more his goddamn scruples go out the window –

Sire, brother. Brother, sire. Edgar feels a jab in his chest. The crack opens -

 “You know bud, as much as I enjoy the show…” Sam has Edgar. Shit, he forgot about -! “You shouldn’t forget about little ol’ me. Very rude, bud.”

Edgar feels the breach of Sam entering him, a burn and stretch that almost sends him over the edge. His teeth wiggle in his gums, his back straining as something lashes and lunges from his gut. He pushes back into Sam, vicious suddenly, only for Sam to shout in triumph, and claw his back, and –

Like that, the moment is gone, and Edgar folds, falling forward, right into the square wall of Alan’s shoulders, and his brother’s grip on the back of his head is possessive, claiming.

“Ah-ah – fuck…” Edgar barely registers the dip of Alan’s head, only to feel – fuck – his brother’s mouth on him, holding his hips steady, preventing Edgar from reaching up to meet Sam’s filthy friction. His mind expands and pops under the onslaught of Sam and Alan, slithering through his brain, coaxing the monster out of him. There is no cloud in the mind, just the itch and twinge of what he is doing, what he is and what he has _became._

They’re fucking the humanity out of him, the sense, the -!

_Don’t be so dramatic,_ Alan murmurs in his head. _I told you to relax._

_You’re sucking me off!_ Inside his head, can he sound hysterical? _You’re –_

_You know what I am._

And like that, Sam and Alan suddenly stop.

Edgar is near enough feral at this point, clawing and hissing as they withdraw, their laughter dark and soft and purely among themselves.

Alan wipes his mouth, which is slick with spit and precum. He and Sam’s faces are human; Edgar’s is horrifyingly not.

“Maybe you should go to Star,” He says quietly. “Maybe she would like to see you this way.”

_“Fuck you!”_ Edgar is bowed over, nails curved inward and cut. His teeth tear at his lower lip. _”Fuck you, the both of you.”_

They laugh again, mirthless.

“Why…” Edgar knows it is his fault, knows he has not schooled himself well enough to know what makes Alan’s resolve breaks, that silent contract of _look don’t touch,_ as if his deranged desperate brother ever needs an excuse _. Edgar_ started this, with his bite and blood lust aggression, with the need to be bold and stupid, for the need to do things he can’t even _name_ yet. “Why have you done this to me?”

Alan sits, his legs crossed. Edgar can spy his erection through his trousers, can feel the heat and blood of it. Alan has no shame. Edgar does.

Alan smokes, and says nothing.

Edgar snaps.

The roar from his throat is matched only by Alan’s arms coming up to defend himself; then Edgar feels his all too human tears on his cheeks as he is flipped, once again, onto the bed and Alan, goddamn, Alan is inside him and his blood sings, all the more hungry, but Alan is gentle, fucking him unhurriedly, his hands sliding under Edgar’s belly and stroking him.

Sam, all spite forgotten, kisses his mouth and brow and hair.

“Goddamn it – Alan, Sam…” Edgar breathes hard into the cotton sheets, wondering all along if they had planned this, planned another unpicking of him, remoulding him to their shape and nothing else. The nights like this, they go and on, dragging onward until his body is set to topple.

But he’s thinking less and less when this happens. He’s thinking less.

_Fighting less._

He screams as he is finally allowed to cum, feels the tobacco stung tenderness of his brother’s breath on his back.

He breathes hard, hard, hard.

Alan lies down beside him, Sam on his left, and Edgar remembers;

_We waited so long for you._

 

* * *

 

The sun burns. Star growls in the pit of her throat and pulls her shawl over her hair. Her exhaustion has increased tenfold since she left the theatre, but her relief has not. Dust paves the way in front of her, pulling her to the open French windows of _The Bookener._

“Good dog,” she murmurs, even as the corners of her sight blink like Christmas lights. Her knees begin to buckle. This was a mistake.

Perfumed arms reach to touch her; Star whistles beneath her teeth and falls, not quite deliberately, into _her_ shocked shop assistant.

“Star?” Zoe smells so _good._ It’s not the blood, it can’t be, it _must_ be something else, even as Star’s teeth discreetly graze her neck. She feels herself thrumming against Zoe, feeling a pull and power in this woman, who is more of what she is, as opposed to Star, who is less of what she _should_ be.

Zoe is panicking. Star smiles clumsily.

“Are you alright? My god, what happened?”

Star doesn’t have the strength. Not with what is currently infesting the lower plains of the theatre, or what she put, god willing, in her belly last night. For once, let some other poor sucker shoulder the burden.

“Can I crash at your place?” she whispers, and at that moment, as everything goes to black, crashes she does.

* * *

 

Early evening, end of August. Blake ticks if off in his head. Prime hunting season. He feels the cool press of a carbon fibre stake against his thigh, his vials of holy water and garlic. Thank god for fanny packs.

He woke up less than an hour ago. The air had been stiff, his throat dry, a feeling of dread tightening his lower stomach. Something big had rolled into town, and it wasn't wearing a cowboy hat. As a hunter he’d gotten a nose for when the big boys rolled into town. Pity Claus hadn't gotten that nose yet. The poor kid was practically sweating out his weight behind him, jumping at anyone who even looked mildly suspicious or overly trendy.

And there they are, the big guns, pulling up on motorbikes by the seawall. They fit no description Blake can pull from memory, which tells him they are in fact tricky customers. The brightest and best of the undead bastards tended to lie low. Alan had only got attention because he had been killing his own kind.

He pokes Claus hard in the side, and jerks his head to the end of the boardwalk.

A striking blonde in black is whipping his leg off his bike, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. Disturbingly pretty enough to make Blake uncomfortable, with diamond cut blue eyes and silver blonde hair. Rocking up behind him is only whom Blake can guess is his consort, a guy who would not look out of place in a 80s Calvin Klein commercial. Dinner isn’t going to be hard for these fuckers. Women and men were already looking them up and down, as if the very air had changed with their arrival.

“God dammit.” Blake crosses his arms. “I wish these damn things weren’t so bloody attractive.”

“Wait…” Claus points to the posers. Blake hisses and slaps his hand down, sharpish. “Those guys are vampires? How do you know?”

“Instinct,” Blake dryly replies. “I’ve been in this game too long. Notice how everything becomes more intense when they drew up? That prickle in the air? Makes you drowsy, doesn’t it?”

“That’s…” Claus blinks, and shakes his head, as if fighting off a yawn. _Good,_ thinks Blake. _The quicker he knows this shit, the better he’ll be at fighting it._ “That’s so weird. I didn’t notice until you said so.”

“People don’t.” Blake clears his throat as the two men opposite draw close together. He’s certain the smirking princess shot him a knowing look. Fuck. With two Master Vamps in town, there could be fireworks. “I-I suggest we find that half vamp dame sooner rather than later.”

“What are you planning on doing with her once you get her?” Claus unhooks his bag, pulling his camera free. He’s been videoing since Blake picked him up, just recording constantly, mostly Blake’s back and the mess of people in San Cazador. Must be a nervous habit, Blake muses. Poor bastard possibly still doesn’t believe in this shit. Just attached himself to Blake out of trauma when he found his previous boss looking like a stripped down Halloween torso. “Don’t you think it’s a bad idea? You steal a va – a half vampire, isn’t that just going to get the others looking for her?”

Claus holds up the camera and trying to pass if off as a casual shot, points it in the direction of the two catalogue models by the seawall.

“I think she’s got a conscience,” Blake is watching them obsessively, chewing a scab on his lower lip. “But I can’t know for certain. Sources tell me she’s been a half vamp for near a decade, and I wanna know why this particular coven have kept her like that. On the other hand, she’s a lure. But on the other hand…” He flips his hand helplessly. “These sons of bitches are nasty. Don’t want to get their attention, you know what I mean?”

Claus does not respond. In fact, he’s making a noise like a wheezing cat. Blake glowers.

“What the hell –“

Claus, ashen, holds up the camera, the ten second video he took on auto play. The seawall is there, as are the passing public, but minus the eerie image of a floating cigarette, neither Abercrombie model can be seen.

“They’re real,” He whispers in a squeak that would sound offensive to a girl scout. “They’re real, they’re fucking real, we’re so completely and utterly _fucked…”_

“Of course they’re real!” snaps Blake. “Why the hell would I make it up, huh? For my goddamn health?”

“Huh?” A pleasant voice interrupts Claus’s growing mania. Blake turns and tries to resist the urge to jump ten feet in the air. Offering them a mild smile is the brunette with the curly down hair. His perfect face is coached with human like amusement. Blake’s hand twitches violently. “Were you filming us?”

“No.” says Claus quickly. “We were just…I was just…”

Blake stares at him as if he’s grown an extra head. The brunette continues to smile indulgently. Over by the seawall, the blonde lurks and waits.

Something in Claus seems to click. Maybe it was his common sense.

“We were just taking crowd pictures,” he continues, quickly. “But if it worries you, I can delete it. I’d happily delete it. Right, Blake?”

“Yeah.” Blake is aware of sweat prickling his back. The man close to him is _very_ beautiful, and very dangerous, and the glamour is giving him a headache.

“I don’t mind. I’m Michael, by the way.” The smile is still friendly, but there’s a certain edge to it, a quirk in the corner of his mouth that mocks. “Can I see it?”

Blake feels his gut fall out.

“No, sorry,” Claus grins like an innocent idiot. “I already deleted it. It was a cruddy shot, anyway.”

Blake mentally picks his gut up from the floor and swallows it.

Michael pauses for a moment – a moment too long for all involved – and shrugs.

“That’s a shame.” He smiles again. “It’s polite to ask, you know.”

“Right, yeah, sorry.” Claus packs the camera away. “I’ll think twice. I should really have a message up here somewhere…” He signals to the walls behind him, spotted with _Missing_ posters. “Put up a consent form or something. You new in town, then?”

“We’re not exactly regulars. Me and my friend are travelling America by bike.” Michael puts his hands in his pockets, ever so pressingly causal. “Maybe I should do what you guys do. Take a camera with me, record my adventures and point it at random if I want to discover something…new.”

The burden of his gaze settles on Blake. Michael sucks his lower lip over white blunt teeth and Blake thinks _fuck, he knows me, he knows our game._

“That’s a good idea,” Claus says brightly. “Personally, a Sony 3000 camcorder is a great buy. Lightweight, easy to haul, and you can usually get a good deal. Pay in instalments, you know.”

“Huh. Okay, I’ll keep that in mind.” Michael brushes a hand through his gorgeous – _for fuck’s sake Blake, fight it_ – outdated mullet shit hair, and looks back at his “friend.” “I’ll see you around. Take care, guys.”

Mercifully, he returns to the seawall, and Blake knows by the time Michael turns around to look, him and Blake will be cruising the rest of the night somewhere well-lit and teamed with people. At the moment however, they can’t run – it would look too suspicious.          

“That was close,” Blake warns. “We’ve got to be vigilant now, because if they have marked us, we’re in deep hell. Not regular hell. Deep, gooey marshmallow roasting hell.”

Blake’s face falls.

“Didn’t I distract him with the camcorder?”

“It was a beautiful sales pitch. Moved me to tears. But…” Blake hesitates, before he sighs. “Good work on keeping your cool. They might have still marked us, but hopefully, they’re just think we’re weirdos.”

“I’m used to that.”

“Yeah.” Blake shoots him a rare smile. “Me too.”

* * *

 

The rush of sunlight is like the ocean being drawn back by the tide. Star senses the sooth of it, the sweet chill of evening as the sun dies, the light on the surface of her eyelids burning down like a candle.  

It’s time for her to wake up.

She wakes not to her peach room, but to the dozy sight of Zoe’s apartment. The television is on, cartoons casting strange shapes of colour and light against Zoe’s cheek, who sits at the end of the couch by Star’s feet, her legs hugged to her chest.

Star sits up. Zoe’s patterned blanket falls away from her chest.

“I…what am I doing here?”

Zoe leans forward and brushes a stray curl from Star’s eye.

“Aside from scaring me half to death?” Zoe sighs, even as her fingers stray to touch her cheek. “You came into my shop this afternoon, and promptly fainted.”

“I fainted?”

“Yeah. Like a heroine from the fifties.”

Star should feel guilty. A worried pallor is peaking Zoe’s cheeks, opening shadows under her eyes. But Star feels warm, for Zoe was worried about her. Zoe, who carried her up here by herself…?

Dust burrows under Star’s skirt and dispels the thought.

“I’m sorry.” Star rises, wrapping the blanket around in the same way she did in the cave. It made her feel safer somehow, like she could shrink into it. But in Zoe’s flat, near Zoe, she feels herself blooming, wanting to take up all this space, all of Zoe’s time. To wake up on Zoe’s couch and feel like a friend who slept off something as mundane as a hangover. To wake up, and for Zoe to be there. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“What did?” Zoe creases the discarded blanket with her long, pale fingers. “You looked like you were running. As if the devil was after you.”

“He is, in a way.”

“Nobody should have to run from anything.” Zoe has a way of speaking, a way that all good people speak, words alive with clear kind sense. Star shines at her. It’s the kind of rugged goodness that no longer fits in her world, but sometimes it’s nice to be reminded. “Is someone hurting you, Star?”

Star’s smile vanishes.

“The only person I’m hurting is myself,” She sits down, pulling the blanket further around her bare shoulders. God, how she wished she had said that to Michael all those years ago. _The only person I’m hurting is myself, but through me, they’re hurting Laddie, and you. Help me. No. Help me help myself, I beg you._

“What do you mean by that?”

Star does not answer. She’s thinking. It was getting harder to think, she had noted, in these last ten years. Harder to resist, harder to find ways to say no, finding she no longer cared if the others brought prey back to their thespian bunker. She still cared, sure, but no longer in that deep wrenching way that used to make her sob behind her cream curtains in the cave. No longer in the way that made her so desperate to get out of her situation she would do stupid shit, like catch a boy’s eye or try to save the life of a runaway kid. No longer in the way that the only active thing she ever did was swap one sense of security for another, to run and plead help from a starved confused halfie like herself with a kid brother and stupid, _stupid_ friends.

“Star?” Zoe traces her shoulder. Star hadn’t seen her move, hadn’t even noticed her closing the distance. It’s night now, she can feel it. Dust emerges from under the blankets and peers up towards her with a softness that is almost nostalgic.

“Sorry.” Star sneers bitterly. “I’m just calling myself out. I hope you don’t think I’m a battered wife, or something.”

Zoe grins.

“You’re too much of a hippie to be a wife.”

“Called out again!”

Zoe laughs, a high appealing trill, and all Star wants to do is walk out of her half vampire skin and cross the gulf that separates them. She looks at Zoe and finds in her that thrill, that yank of emotions that once spiralled her across a Santa Carla midnight, when there was a boy in the crowd. It’s been so long since she felt that, felt the creep of desire, the prospect of something beyond resignation, and with a lurch both exquisite and agonising, she looks at Zoe and finds herself caring again.

The space between them is just right. They are upstairs, away from eyes, both vampire and human. Zoe’s hand is on her shoulder and Star is reaching for her face, the great nostalgic swell of music and Michael in her blood, and –

Her teeth. Her tongue dances behind them, and feels the point of her incisors, pushing ruthlessly from the gum, as slow and steady as a cat on the prowl. Star tears herself away just as Zoe’s breath meets her lips.

Star senses Zoe’s flinch, her confusion, the way her hand is held aloft for the embrace that never came. Star marches to the window, where the moon is full and fat and glaring through the blinds. She wants to apologise. She wants to be uncaring, untouchable again. She wants to think of blood and Edgar and look forward to her morning feed. But she can’t. She can’t.

“Hey…” Zoe’s hands rest on Star’s upper arms. The smell of undergrowth, of sticky wet autumn leaves, is stronger now than ever. “I’m not working tonight. How about we have a night on the town? Like…play the penny machines and try to win a stuffed teddy or two?”

Star stays away from San Cazador boardwalk. It’s too polished and chirpy for her tastes. That’s not the real reason why she stays away, of course. If she walks through the strings of lights and the fortune teller booth and the big, plastic carnival mannequins she swears she feels the tiny shadow of Laddie at her feet.

“I’ve not played those since I was a kid,” She guffaws, hoping it disguises the tears. “That sounds fun.”

“You need fun.” Again, that tone, as if she can make everything better just by wishing it. “I warn you, I’m a dab hand at the booths. I’ll win you something bigger and cuddlier then Dust.”

Dust, appearing to take offense at such a suggestion, bites the end of Star’s skirt and gives it a hard tug – towards Zoe.


End file.
